economic situation is dire

[Genie]

despite being dead for 2000 years he'd probably be more positive than you.

[tonyh29]

I know it's the tory party's overriding approach to keep repeating that Brown caused the recession, in the hope that constant repetition will make people believe it, but it really is nonsense.

and yet repeated mantra on Osborne is well reasoned and thought out posts :?

The post was that Osborne is the worse person to ever hold high office , apparently I'm the only person in the world that doesn't think this .... my counter claim was that Brown would more than hold his own in that race ... in it's simplest terms Brown has to take his part of the blame .. he was a terrible chancellor and an even worse PM ..surely even you have to acknowledge that , political bias and hatred of toffs apart

[snowychap]

despite being dead for 2000 years he'd probably be more positive than you.

Any need to make this personal? No.

Try sticking to the subject, i.e. the content of my post - the implication of which was that things weren't necessarily as simple as the conclusion that you and Tony have drawn (i.e. that a company posting large profits is necessarily good news for the wider economy or for 'recovery').

I'd say there were many factors involved, some of which may be what happens with those profits (reinvestment, return to shareholders, &c.), whether those profits have come about through cost cutting (unlikely as the previous news was about JLR creating new jobs, wasn't it?) and so on.

Then there's the effect of likely increased sales/turnover upon the balance of trade but set against that is whether the benefits to the supply chain are local and so on.

The fact that JLR is doing well is good for the economy (it is certainly much better than it doing badly); that it has posted large profits (in and of itself without looking at the other factors and therefore more deeply than the headline) does not necessarily mean good news (other than for the company, the shareholders and so on).

[Genie]

I think you're just picking an argument for the sake of it.

JLR is booming, it is very well documented that they have a range of products that are selling very well, they're hiring thousands more engineers and track workers. They're building a new engine plant in Wolverhampton. They're investing over £1billion pounds every year on D&D. They're exporting to new markets like China, Russia and India.

Why on earth would you try and make that sound like it wasn't necessarily good news?

[tonyh29]

as simple as the conclusion that you and Tony have drawn (i.e. that a company posting large profits is necessarily good news for the wider economy or for 'recovery').

and I stated that conclusion where exactly ?

[snowychap]

I think you're just picking an argument for the sake of it.

You would be incorrect.

JLR is booming, it is very well documented that they have a range of products that are selling very well, they're hiring thousands more engineers and track workers. They're building a new engine plant in Wolverhampton. They're investing over £1billion pounds every year on D&D. They're exporting to new markets like China, Russia and India.

Why on earth would you try and make that sound like it wasn't necessarily good news?

I'd suggest that you go back and read my posts then as I don't believe I was doing that.

My first point was:

Whilst it's undoubtedly good news for the company itself and its owners/shareholders (and probably its workforce), I'm not sure whether that necessarily translates into 'flying the flag for recovery'.

The 'that' being a £557m pre tax profit for the last quarter.

I went on to post further down that there were many factors to be considered along with the posting of a profit (such as how it has been achieved, the effects of that company's prosperity upon other indicators (balance of trade for example) and so on) and that the fact that JLR is doing well is good for the economy, by which I mean that the other factors reported (not just the profit) suggest that this is the case.

Edit: In light of the PM exchange, I hope we've cleared that up and I apologize again for not making my comment clearer in the first place (about it being a wider point beyond JLR).

[JulieB]

I don't think you can seperate the parties or their chancellor's on economics .....they all seem to be running around like headless chickens stranded in the middle of the M6 trying to dodge the bright lights thundering towards them!

Oddly enough the one Chancellor I thought had a grasp on at least SOME of what needed doing was Alistair Darling, however Brown ruled the roost as we all know.

[peterms]

I know it's the tory party's overriding approach to keep repeating that Brown caused the recession, in the hope that constant repetition will make people believe it, but it really is nonsense.

and yet repeated mantra on Osborne is well reasoned and thought out posts :?

You don't think it's a deliberate tactic that almost every utterance from a government minister since the last election has been along the lines of "the mess Labour left us", attempting to conflate in peoples' minds the financial crisis caused by the banking sector, and the government in charge at the time?

Or do you mean you really do think the crash of 2008 was caused by Gordon Brown?

As for Osborne, my post was in hindsight possibly too generous. I attributed his policies to stupidity, but perhaps it's more sinister than that. Perhaps he really does have some inkling of the damage he's causing.

[PauloBarnesi]

Or do you mean you really do think the crash of 2008 was caused by Gordon Brown?

Course he didn’t, but what seems to have become apparent is that Brown didn’t have a good grip on what was going on before. His belief that somehow boom and bust was over is an example. We could go on and on.

Is Osbourne any good? Probably not. But the reality is that Brown had a wave of prosperity to ride on. All Osbourne has is a flat sea and devastated landscape to look upon.

[peterms]

How much of this growth was due to a credit based consumer spending boom fed by a commodities bubble (rampant house price inflation in this case) wasn't a major contributory factor of this house price inflation bubble easy and often wreckless supply of credit from the financial sector as is usually the route cause of all commodity bubbles.

You definitely can't say Brown was just an innocent bystander and just as equally you can't say he alone is to blame, the seeds were sown by earlier Governments, and the worry is current government seem more intent on supporting the same scenario rather than learn from these mistakes.

The piece I linked, which annoyingly won't let me copy text to quote, basically says (p9) that finance was not responsible for much productivity growth. This is further explained in a footnote saying that the toxic assets of banks don't show up in GDP, and that the contribution of finance to GDP as measured here is via "vanilla" banking services.

Undoubtedly there is a massive problem caused by the rapid expansion of private debt, but the paper is showing that this was not the main cause of the growth in GDP and national productivity during that period.

This expansion of private debt is sometimes linked to the government, as though it was some sort of deliberate government policy. In fact it's more like a natural outcome of capitalism. If people have consumed as much as they can afford, how can they persuaded to consume more, so that further profits can be made? The answer is by getting them to go further into debt. This acts both as an engine of redistribution from debtors to lenders, ie from poorer to richer, and also as a source of new sales, and therefore profit.

The last government should have been far tougher in regulating the finance sector, but it's worth noting that there is a cross-party consensus, created by much lobbying, donations and infiltration, that regulation is dangerous and best kept to an absolute minimum. See for example the strenuous efforts to water down the already weak Vickers recommendations; the complete absence of prosecution of key players in the crisis (apart from that arse at MF Global, which is hardly typical); and the utter failure to explain exactly where the QE money has gone and who has benefitted.

We seem to value speculation over investment. And leveraged speculation, at that. Unsustainable, and unsupportable. But it's how many of the top dogs make their money.

[peterms]

Or do you mean you really do think the crash of 2008 was caused by Gordon Brown?

Course he didn’t, but what seems to have become apparent is that Brown didn’t have a good grip on what was going on before. His belief that somehow boom and bust was over is an example. We could go on and on.

Is Osbourne any good? Probably not. But the reality is that Brown had a wave of prosperity to ride on. All Osbourne has is a flat sea and devastated landscape to look upon.

It is indeed hubristic nonsense to claim that a government can end boom and bust. Look at this, for example:

Chancellor claims recovery marks an end to 'boom and bust' cycle. Bet he felt a bit silly later.

The devastation in the landscape is being wrought by Osborne, as a matter of political choice. He is consciously redistributing wealth from poor to rich, pushing unemployment up in order to push down wages, demonising the poor and those on benefits, while throwing money at the banks.

It would be entirely possible to follow policies which create employment, stimulate demand, support productive businesses rather than speculators and asset-strippers, and so on.

His pretence that it's all somehow out of his hands is a contemptible lie. As an example, we can see how even the weak and feeble measures to stimulate demand taken by the hugely disappointing Obama are having some effect. Quite inadequate, but at least a move in the right direction.

[JulieB]

Excellent article from the Daily Hail for once. Ruth Sunderland has got it spot on in my book.

No wizardry from Merlin, as banks lend £10bn less to small businesses

Most politicians are utterly clueless about the really important forces that hold sway over voters’ lives. They either know nothing at all about economics, banking and financial markets, or have only the most rudimentary and superficial grasp.

So it should surprise no-one that the Project Merlin deal concocted between the banks and the government has descended into disrepute.

Merlin was a wheeze cooked up by John Varley, the former chief executive of Barclays. It was meant to be useful to banks and politicians. If it could be shown that banks were, in fact, lending to small firms and helping with economic recovery, their image would be improved and the coalition would look good too.

The result: lending to business overall declined by nearly £10bn last year and the banks fell short by £1bn of their target for small business loans.

As part of Merlin, the bonuses of bank chief executives were meant to be influenced by how well they managed to get credit flowing to the real economy. That was always going to be impossible to measure objectively and this year’s bonus round at Barclays and RBS is likely to make it look like a mockery.

The one year Merlin experiment is now being dumped. It was an absurdity from the start. There were two sets of targets: the public ones, and then the real ones, which were a secret.

I asked the chairman and chief executive of RBS how well they were doing on Merlin a couple of weeks ago and struggled to make sense of the answers.

It is too simplistic, however, to conclude that churlish banks are unwilling to lend to small firms. Banks are in a difficult spot, as they have piles of rubbishy loans on their books already. They also need to rebuild their capital in order to meet new rules and more importantly, in order to be able to withstand storms from the Eurozone.

Pretty tricky, then, for them to do all of that, and simultaneously lend more to firms.

In my view, the root of the problem is structural. Back in the boom years, President Clinton, under intense lobbying from Wall Street, repealed legislation that separated casino banking from plain vanilla lending.

We should not allow the UK to be held hostage by the flawed credit ratings agencies

Bank lending to business slumps by £10bn: Blow for Osborne as his big push fails to help cash-strapped firms

That encouraged banks such as Barclays and RBS to branch out from their traditional businesses and attempt to become global powerhouses. Menial stuff such as lending to small companies that at one time was the lifeblood of banks became a low priority, way down the banker glamour stakes.

For the half-century in which those Depression era rules – known as Glass Steagall - held sway, there were no global systemic financial crises. Restoring a modernised version of them would help bring back a financial system with banks that concentrated on what they should be doing – lending to creditworthy individuals and companies – instead of inventing weapons of financial mass destruction and spraying them around the world.

Moody's Blues

Merlin is not the only example of politicians getting burned when they try to make electoral capital out of the financial crisis.

Both the Chancellor George Osborne and his Labour shadow Ed Balls have claimed the threatened downgrade by Moody’s of the UK’s Triple A credit rating as an endorsement of their own policies.

Osborne says it is a badge of support for his austerity measures, Balls argues it shows austerity isn’t working.

Both should pipe down. Credit agencies are discredited and their views are largely irrelevant. Their appalling record in the credit crunch, where they failed to see the problems with the baroque sub-prime vehicles the banks were cooking up, led to them being investigated by the US authorities. They were riddled with conflicts of interest – they were paid by those issuing these horrible securities, not by the suckers buying them – and many of their people who viewed a stint at an agency as training for a more lucrative job on Wall Street or in the City.

The chances of the UK government defaulting on its debts, which is what the agencies purport to assess, is zero. That is because the UK issues its own currency, so we can ‘monetize’ any level of borrowings. In fact, we are doing just that, through the outsize programme of money-printing or Quantitative Easing.

Osborne would do better to devote his brain cells to the risks of QE, and to developing a proper growth strategy, including scrapping useless red tape and improving the education system so employers could actually hire decent quality staff.

That would help the economy far more than half-baked initiatives such as Merlin, or pointless spats about Moody’s.

[PauloBarnesi]

The devastation in the landscape is being wrought by Osborne, as a matter of political choice. He is consciously redistributing wealth from poor to rich, pushing unemployment up in order to push down wages, demonising the poor and those on benefits, while throwing money at the banks.

I thought it was a Labour government that bailed out the banks? That was throwing money at the banks and bankers (as well as honours). I doubt the Tories would have done anything differently and I don’t believe they would have prevented it either.

Maybe Labour should have reaped the economic good times and saved some, and spent some on real job creation, and not just the expansion of the public sector

They are all as bad as each other.

Anyway we aren’t all doomed.

I am sure some won’t like Private Eye because it has people who went to public school and Oxbridge

Private Eye hits highest circulation for more than 25 years

Satirical magazine marks 50th birthday with nearly 230,000 fortnightly sales, as other current affairs titles also prosper

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Comments (42)

Ben Dowell

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 February 2012 14.18 GMT

Article history

Cover story: Private Eye editor Ian Hislop hailed its 10% growth in a year. Photograph: Tony Kyriacou/Rex Features

Fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye recorded its highest circulation for more than 25 years as it celebrated its 50th anniversary in the second half of 2011, selling an average of nearly 230,000 copies a fortnight during an exceptionally busy period for news.

Private Eye remains the biggest-selling UK news and current affairs magazine but it was a good six months for other news and current affairs titles, with The Week, The Oldie, Prospect and BBC History magazine all up on the first half of 2011 and year on year, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures published on Thursday.

Private Eye averaged 228,112 copies a fortnight in the six months to the end of December, up 10.6% on the previous half year and a 10.1% year-on-year rise.

This is the biggest circulation figure since editor Ian Hislop's first year in charge, when sales was the highest ever in the magazine's 50-year history at 238,332 in December 1986. Hislop said: "10% growth in a year, I feel like the chancellor – in his dreams."

Private Eye has benefited from an eventful year in current affairs, with revelations on phone hacking and the financial crisis dominating its coverage. The title also benefited from the publicity surrounding its 50th birthday in October, with a book by Eye staff member Adam Macqueen making the Sunday Times bestseller chart.

The magazine's managing director, Sheila Molnar, said:"It has been an amazing year for the Eye. The publicity that our 50th anniversary generated, the V&A exhibition, publication of The A-Z of Private Eye – The First 50 Years, has had an enormous impact on sales. The first question I am always asked is 'What is the secret of the Eye's success?' Simply, the magazine is entertaining, informative, and very reasonably priced at £1.50."

Elsewhere in the news and current affairs sector, The Week was up a solid 3.9% year on year to 187,536 – a rise of 2.1% compared with the first half of 2011. Monthly magazine Prospect increased its circulation 0.4% period on period and 0.5% year on year to 32,105.

The Oldie, the magazine edited by Private Eye's founder and former editor Richard Ingrams, also did well, adding 6.4% year on year to record a sale 41,008. This was up 1.5% on the previous six-month period to the end of June.

However, things were less positive for rightwing political weekly the Spectator, which recorded a modest 1.1% rise on the period with a 63,543 circulation but was down 9.6% year on year.

The Economist's performance remained static with a circulation of 210,384 for the UK edition, up just 66 copies from the figures for the end of June 2011, a 0.1% year-on-year rise. The continental Europe edition was up 0.3% on the period to 241,726 and flat year on year.

BBC History Magazine's circulation was 72,271 for the period, up 4.1% on the first half of 2011 and 4.2% year on year.

MoneyWeek was up 10.7% year on year to 50,036, a 5.6% period-on-period rise.

Investors Chronicle, from FT Business, slipped 6.1% over the six months to record a circulation of 26,753. The title was down 6.2% year on year.

The leftwing weekly current affairs magazine New Statesman does not submit an ABC figure.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

[tonyh29]

Chancellor claims recovery marks an end to 'boom and bust' cycle. Bet he felt a bit silly later.

now as most of you know i have a tenancy to not fully read long articles but as I skimmed read that I didn't actually see any part where Clarke makes the statement that you've tried to attribute to him

he said "we are committed to ending the days of boom and bust" not that he HAD...

not guilty of reading a misleading headline perchance were we ?

where as a certain Mr G Brown actually said " we will NOT return to the old boom and bust"

A claim this video reckons he repeated no fewer than 100 timers in the house of Commons

[colhint]

why dont we just get prudence back, she seemed to know what was going on

[itdoesntmatterwhatthissay]

Excellent article from the Daily Hail for once. Ruth Sunderland has got it spot on in my book.

[peterms]

Chancellor claims recovery marks an end to 'boom and bust' cycle. Bet he felt a bit silly later.

now as most of you know i have a tenancy to not fully read long articles but as I skimmed read that I didn't actually see any part where Clarke makes the statement that you've tried to attribute to him

he said "we are committed to ending the days of boom and bust" not that he HAD...

not guilty of reading a misleading headline perchance were we ?

where as a certain Mr G Brown actually said " we will NOT return to the old boom and bust"

A claim this video reckons he repeated no fewer than 100 timers in the house of Commons

Have it from another source, then; an interview with the man himself.

Clarke says he first came up with the "No return to boom and bust" line when he was Chancellor from 1993 to 1997, and that Brown stole the phrase from him. "I have never believed you can abolish the economic cycle but the aim of policymakers should be to take the top off the upswing, to give you a cushion on the downturn."

Do you actually perceive a difference between "No return to boom and bust" and "we will not return to the old boom and bust"?

Lawson then criticised Clarke:

LORD LAWSON last night took a calculated sideswipe at Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor, by warning that it was 'premature' to promise an end to 'boom and bust'

[Risso]

This expansion of private debt is sometimes linked to the government, as though it was some sort of deliberate government policy. In fact it's more like a natural outcome of capitalism.

The last government should have been far tougher in regulating the finance sector

That seems like a bit of a contradiction to me.

The taking away of the Bank of England's powers contributed to the meltdown. Under Labour's watch, we had five of the biggest 10 banks in the world, including the biggest in RBS. That was deliberate government policy.

[peterms]

I thought it was a Labour government that bailed out the banks? That was throwing money at the banks and bankers (as well as honours). I doubt the Tories would have done anything differently and I don’t believe they would have prevented it either.

Maybe Labour should have reaped the economic good times and saved some, and spent some on real job creation, and not just the expansion of the public sector

Both governments bailed out the banks. Of the two, Brown seems to have the better excuse, that of imminent meltdown (though Clarke criticised him for not acting two weeks earlier, when the Treasury had started to press for the bailout).

Three years later, when so much has been discovered and explained about what actually happened to the QE money instead of it ending up stimulating the economy, and when there has been time to understand and prepare for it, there seems to be neither the excuse of urgency nor ignorance.

On the other point, governments don't save in their own currency. But yes, more should be done to create real jobs, whether in the public or private sector, rather than fake jobs, whether in the public or private sector. At the moment, it seems we have a lot of fake jobs being created, all in the private sector. Mock apprenticeship schemes. Work programme placements. "Self employed" contractors on zero hours. Cold callers on commission. It all helps discipline the labour force while artificially depressing the jobless numbers.

[VILLAFC2000]

Are we likely to have growth over .2% this 1/4?