The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[bickster]

10 minutes ago, CVByrne said:

The mass money printing in response to Covid was is a big factor in the inflation. Needed to be done but there was always going to be a cost to it. 

So the trigger was COVID, the response was money printing. Governments didn't cause COVID

[CVByrne]

4 minutes ago, bickster said:

So the trigger was COVID, the response was money printing. Governments didn't cause COVID

Did I say Govenments caused COVID? I was just pointing out that the response to Covid - which needed to be done - is a factor in the inflation. 

[foreveryoung]

23 minutes ago, CVByrne said:

The mass money printing in response to Covid was is a big factor in the inflation. Needed to be done but there was always going to be a cost to it. 

Well maybe an extra 50 Billion didn't have to be printed, i.e dodgy PPE contracts etc.

[KentVillan]

27 minutes ago, CVByrne said:

The mass money printing in response to Covid was is a big factor in the inflation. Needed to be done but there was always going to be a cost to it. 

Just to be clear - the original debate was over Friedman’s claim that govts cause all inflation.

Can govts cause or exacerbate inflation? Yes, of course. Are they always the cause? No. Are their inflationary policies always a mistake? No, sometimes inflation is the lesser of two evils.

[KentVillan]

4 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

Well maybe an extra 50 Billion didn't have to be printed, i.e dodgy PPE contracts etc.

Doesn’t that 50bn figure include a lot of stuff that was necessary? I think the PPE component was more like £4-10bn (still an insane amount of money of course).

[bickster]

18 minutes ago, CVByrne said:

Did I say Govenments caused COVID? I was just pointing out that the response to Covid - which needed to be done - is a factor in the inflation. 

But that isn't what the conversation is about

[MakemineVanilla]

Here's what Friedman actually said:

 

[maqroll]

Sunak makes me uncomfortable. The jerky body language, the platitudes, the fact that he can't even answer the question. So sleazy.

 

[ml1dch]

1 hour ago, maqroll said:

Sunak makes me uncomfortable. The jerky body language, the platitudes, the fact that he can't even answer the question. So sleazy.

 

The whole Tory plan for the next election seems to be gearing up to be "you may hate us, but you all love this guy in charge, right?". 

Which given he appears to be a short-tempered, unlikeable weirdo whenever you put him in front of real people seems to be a flawed strategy. 

Edited January 15, 2023 by ml1dch

[OutByEaster?]

He looks like he's operated by puppetry.

[bickster]

1 hour ago, maqroll said:

Sunak makes me uncomfortable. The jerky body language, the platitudes, the fact that he can't even answer the question. So sleazy.

Clearly I'm no Sunak fan but to be fair to him, that's an ambush. He clearly wasn't there to talk about a theoretical de facto referendum extrapolated from the next General Election results. That is also a terrible awfully desperate tactic from the SNP.

I'm no fan of Johnson either but you get the impression that Johnson would have answered the question and told the interviewer what a dreadful idea it was.

Truss would have talked about Goat's Milk (and probably pronounced it milf)

Starmer wouldn't have answered the question either but he's have done it with more polish and come across as human

But it does essentially boil down to it being an ambush and a silly notion. Sunak just hasn't got the balls to go off script, he's the lad from school that did well in tests as long as he knew what the question would be beforehand

[KentVillan]

This is a great long read on inflation, including a critique of Friedman

https://evonomics.com/the-truth-about-inflation-why-milton-friedman-was-wrong-again/

Quote

Like much of economic theory, Friedman’s thinking appears plausible on first glance. Inflation is a general rise in prices. And since prices are nothing but the exchange of money, more circulating money means prices must increase. Hence, inflation is ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’.

Unfortunately, this thinking falls apart on further inspection. The problem is that it treats inflation as a uniform rise in prices. That’s theoretically convenient, but empirically false. In the real world, inflation is wildly divergent. At the same time that the price of apples rises by 5%, the price of cars could grow by 50%, and the price of clothing might fall by 20%.

To understand inflation as it actually exists, we must look not to economics textbooks, but to real-world data. That’s what political economist Jonathan Nitzan did during his PhD research in the early 1990s. His work culminated in a dissertation called Inflation As Restructuring. In the real world, Nitzan observed, price change is always ‘differential’, meaning there are winners and losers. The consequence is that inflation is not purely a ‘monetary phenomenon’, as Milton Friedman claimed. Inflation restructures the social order.

…

We can see that inflation varies greatly between different commodity groups. Some groups, like ‘men’s apparel’, have experienced little (if any) inflation. Other groups, like ‘private transportation’, have seen massive price hikes. Figure 4 also shows that inflation varies greatly within each commodity group. Inflation often coexists with deflation — a fact that’s evident when the boxes cross the dashed red line.

So the real inflation story, which goes largely undiscussed, is that price change is remarkably non-uniform. In fact, it is so non-uniform that reporting the change in the average price borders on meaningless. So why does price-change variation go unreported?

Perhaps we can excuse newspapers from not printing charts like Figures 3 and 4. These graphs are admittedly more challenging to interpret than simply reporting the percentage change of a price index. This difficulty, though, doesn’t get economists off the hook. Every trained economist ought to know how to interpret the type of evidence shown above. And yet, even in the technical literature, you’re unlikely to find a dissagregated analysis of inflation. Why?

The point being that you can have very evenly distributed price inflation caused by govt. Or you can have very sector / commodity specific inflation driven by supply factors, exogenous shocks, that kind of thing. Friedman waves all of the latter away with a sleight of hand - but it doesn’t make sense if you think about it, or at least isn’t a useful way of thinking about it, even if it’s right in terms of the framework he’s constructed to evaluate his own argument.

[maqroll]

25 minutes ago, bickster said:

Clearly I'm no Sunak fan but to be fair to him, that's an ambush. He clearly wasn't there to talk about a theoretical de facto referendum extrapolated from the next General Election results. That is also a terrible awfully desperate tactic from the SNP.

I'm no fan of Johnson either but you get the impression that Johnson would have answered the question and told the interviewer what a dreadful idea it was.

Truss would have talked about Goat's Milk (and probably pronounced it milf)

Starmer wouldn't have answered the question either but he's have done it with more polish and come across as human

But it does essentially boil down to it being an ambush and a silly notion. Sunak just hasn't got the balls to go off script, he's the lad from school that did well in tests as long as he knew what the question would be beforehand

He probably could have expected that question, though. He wasn't there to talk about it, but reporters aren't obligated to ask questions that politicians want asked, the result would just be propaganda. 

[chrisp65]

Absolutely legitimate question from a journalist that isn’t there simply to be liked by Westminster.

If you’re so thick or self obsessed or poorly advised that you go to Scotland and can’t answer a very simple question on this being a voluntary union of equals then you’re not fit for the job.

[bickster]

1 minute ago, maqroll said:

He probably could have expected that question, though. He wasn't there to talk about it, but reporters aren't obligated to ask questions that politicians want asked, the result would just be propaganda. 

That's not really the way things work. One on one interviews like that are generally agreed in advance. Yes they are propaganda.

We've seen it with Sunak before. There's a video out there of a journo going off piste and Sunak just unable to answer, so he says the interview is over and walks off, with his microphone still attached making him look like a masive dick. It seems he at least learned that lesson. But this will keep happening and it could be any subject. Sunak is useless at interviews and public speaking. Well he's useless at many things that involve personal interaction and empathy but public speaking and interviews are just one of the most obvious things

[ml1dch]

6 minutes ago, bickster said:

That's not really the way things work. One on one interviews like that are generally agreed in advance. Yes they are propaganda.

All true, but in advance of any trip to Scotland you'd have thought they might have anticipated the question coming up at some point and not having some sort of answer in place seems pretty amateurish. 

It's not even a difficult question to answer.  "No, a general election shouldn't be seen as a referendum on a single issue. And the question of independence should be revisited when there is clear evidence that a majority of Scottish people want it to be revisited and there is no evidence for that at the moment"

The truth on those points can obviously be debated, but they're perfectly coherent answers which don't make you look like a wally in an interview. 

[bickster]

14 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

All true, but in advance of any trip to Scotland you'd have thought they might have anticipated the question coming up at some point and not having some sort of answer in place seems pretty amateurish. 

It's not even a difficult question to answer.  "No, a general election shouldn't be seen as a referendum on a single issue. And the question of independence should be revisited when there is clear evidence that a majority of Scottish people want it to be revisited and there is no evidence for that at the moment"

The truth on those points can obviously be debated, but they're perfectly coherent answers which don't make you look like a wally in an interview. 

I think most politicians could have answered it perfectly adequately as you say but this is Sunak, he's shit at it.

Edited January 15, 2023 by bickster

[ml1dch]

1 minute ago, bickster said:

I think most politicians could have answered it perfectly adequately as you say but this is Sunak, he's shit at it.

He doesn't even need to be good at it. He waffled out a prepared, scripted answer about something else. All he needed was for James Forsyth to say "here's your stock answer to anything about Scottish independence, memorise it" and he's fine. 

It just shows not only is he bad at it, but he is also surrounded by other people who are bad at what they're supposed to be doing.

[bickster]

2 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

He doesn't even need to be good at it. He waffled out a prepared, scripted answer about something else. All he needed was for James Forsyth to say "here's your stock answer to anything about Scottish independence, memorise it" and he's fine. 

It just shows not only is he bad at it, but he is also surrounded by other people who are bad at what they're supposed to be doing.

Agreed and their response will incorrect too. They won't prepare Sunak better, they'll refuse to be interviewed by STV bloke again, just like the refused to go on Ch4 News for ages

[KentVillan]

Sunak is a classic Chancellor PM. Can talk for hours on fiscal policy, inflation, etc (to the point of losing his audience) but very weak and naive on social, constitutional, party political issues.

I think he’ll actually turn out to be a significantly better PM than all of his Tory predecessors post-Brown (in the sense that he’ll do the least damage) but he still makes weird, avoidable mistakes. I know some of you argue he is just nastier than he comes across, but *surely* he doesn’t for a minute think Braverman belongs in the cabinet for example, but there she is.