The Free Market ideology of Friedman and his like became enshrined in international agreement in 1995 when government’s signed the Uruguay round of GATT (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs). In most countries the agreement was signed without any public debate or even awareness of what was being signed and decided. In the UK […]

The Irish banks need €24 billion. So now we know. WHAT?!  Until we know WHY the losses keep on appearing like poisonous toadstools in the dark, then we know nothing. Does anyone imagine that the reason why we now find that the banks need more money is because the previous 4 times the government inspectors

Ireland, Greece and Portugal should all default on their debt. The problem with saying that is that as soon as you do, a great clucking flock of Chicken Littles come speeding out of their corners, kicking up dust and confusion and drowning out any attempt to discuss the issue beneath a frenzy of shrill cries

It is time to look ahead. Not because there isn’t quite enough going wrong right now to occupy us all, but because I am tired of being taken by surprise. It is time to stop reacting to events and at least try to guess what consequences are going to unfold from what has already happened

Are we all in this together?  Well only in the sense that in a drive-by shooting the killer, victim and gun are all in it together – just on different ends of it.  Same with our recovery. We’re all in it, but one man’s efficiency saving, is another’s unemployment. Eurostat, the European agency which gathers

This is going to be an interesting week. The Irish are now openly saying they want to make the Senior bond holders take some of the bank losses. That is most definitely not in the European Financial Class’s game plan.  Neither France nor Germany nor the UK will like the sound of it. Because for

The Nuclear and the Financial industries are both supposed to be carefully regulated. Their potential for causing systemic and widespread harm was supposed to be reflected in the fact that they both have not only ‘powerful’ national regulators but also international ones as well. The shoe industry doesn’t have its own regulator with its own

There are reports of another oil spill in the Gulf just off the Louisiana coast about twenty miles from the site of BP’s ClearWater Horizon rig.  The spill is said to have originated from W&T Offshore’s Matterhorn SeaStar rig. Another deep water rig. So far the details come largely from this article from the Tallashassi Environmental

Japan is now facing two melt downs.  Nuclear and market/yen. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is facing one and causing the other. The news from the reactors at Fukushima is contradictory and would be comic if it wasn’t horrific.  What we do know is that the French are advising their

Events in Japan and the Middle East will now, I think, slowly start to combine. Japan has lost the output from a large number of reactors. One of her largest, one of the largest reactors in the world, in fact. Japan has lost a great deal of power generating capacity, about 9.7 gigawatts, from closed