Aye and it creates an equal and opposite dilemma on the other side. We might just have to get used to agreeing for a bit!

Surprise surprise, another DG rant.

Almost everything you mention about is to do with either sudden massive demand on disrupted supply chains and/or the great unwashed panic buying. The government won't 'change the rules' at a whim - those decisions will be made based on NHS advice in view of current supply and demand, projected demand, incoming supply timelines and prioritisation of which staff/departments need the best equipment the most.

I'm not pretending everything is perfect - only the perpetually dim of brain would expect that in these circumstances. Yes, of course all of those on the frontline should be fully supplied with the very best kit - but that simply isn't possible, at least not straight away. Just as the stark truth is we have to accept some of us are going to die, the stark truth is not everything will be work as we would like it to.

I saw an interview with a US pandemic advisor the other night. One of his major concerns - despite his protests over years - was the fact that almost 100% of medical-standard (N95/FFB3?) masks in the USA are supplies are sourced from one town in China - which is now in lockdown. I don't know the numbers but the NHS also sources a significant volume of equipment from China. A combination of massive demand and supply chain disruption is always going cause problems. And let's not disregard the many millions of face masks snapped up by the public. Unless you mandate diverse global supply chains and hold stockpiles, in times of escalated demand there will be a period of shortages while things adjust - which is exactly what is happening.

Of course I imagine in your delirious socialist utopia there are millions of Hazmat suits, gowns, gloves, visors, masks and ventilators sitting in storage just waiting for such an event (notwithstanding most of these items degrade over time and are eventually no longer fit for purpose), and every medical facility has the facilities and resources to handle a sudden influx of possible hundreds of thousands of critical patients.

The government has gone well beyond what any of us could have foreseen with their financial support. And yet they could arguably do more - the self-employed, for example - but so far they have stepped up and saved millions of jobs, homes, incomes, businesses, and relieved the massive stress many people are under. More measures are likely. Can you bring yourself to acknowledge that, at least?

BTW, can I make a point you don't seem to understand. The government are being advised by a panel of field-leading experts. Decisions are led by their conclusions, studies and advice, resulting from analysing the experiences of other nations, the very best medical and scientific knowledge, and vast computer modelling. It would most likely be the same experts leading a Labour government reaching the same conclusions. Instead of ranting, take some time to really understand why we've taken the path we have.

The equivalent would be "you now have to remove asbestos from ten times the numbers of buildings in half the time, and by the way your gloves/masks/overalls supplier is locked down and can't supply for a few weeks".

Yes, I agree it's terrible some NHS staff are having to work without the correct equipment and as we know they deserve all the support the country can muster. Supplies will come and this work has been in progress for weeks, but catching up in the face of massive demand and disrupted supply chains takes a little time. Not to mention the public has bought millions of masks in the last few weeks.

And here we go again with the crony capitalism

Profits are capitalism
Losses are socialism.

Yet again we see that capitalism can only operate within a socialist framework.

And here is the Tory government bailing out all their crony CEO and stock market millionaire and billionaire pals with never ending sums of public money, that has been auspicious by its absence for the last ten years.

And paying the wages of its Tory voting base, whilst frontline nhs workers are putting their lives on the line for zip extra is Tory dna all over.

Who asked the public where their money should be directed?

This Tory government Fannied about for a month in protecting its crony pals wealth, at the expense of public health, in my book a crime against humanity.

Any firm that accepts public cash must give the public a stake in the company, and be obliged to buy it back in the future.

I honestly despair the politicising of this issue, but I am unsurprised.

[url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51989183DG, Superblue, do you like amonia on your chips?, the PRIVATE SECTOR just urinated on them[/url

[url=https://abc14news.com/2020/03/21/macrons-france-seizes-lorries-carrying-130000-masks-to-uk-hospitalsand the French do the same to the Socialist Remoaners...[/url

And where’s all the Tory voting, Nanny State bashers all of a sudden?

They’re all stood in the state handout line with their caps out



Well there are plenty of low paid jobs in the nhs, and plenty of zero hours contract jobs in the supermarkets for you lot, not just the “unemployed benefit scroungers.”

Time for you ten bob Tory voters to practice what you been a preaching.

Principled Hypocrites

In the words of Donald J Trump





January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”

February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”

February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”

March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”

March 9: “This blindsided us."

March 9: "The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.”

March 10: "It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."

March 12: ""I don't take responsibility at all"--- Epitomizing ALL that is Dotard's way of dealing with anything and everything in the US which he can't steal credit.

March 13: National Emergency Declaration


And backside boris fell in synch

Jesus wept. And the left get all butthurt when everyone laughs at them.







Not that I disagree with taking the pi5s out of Trump, fwiw.

^
Laughing with us actually, laughing at you




Closet Socialist

It is striking how fast the economic mitigation has escalated. 11 days ago Rishi Sunak’s budget included a pledge of £12 billion (roughly £180 per capita) of emergency spending. It was a budget that prompted the most recent former PM and chancellor to warn against abandoning restraint and caution.

5 days ago Sunak returned to the magic money tree to offer business £300 billion of loans (about £4500 per capita) at attractive interest rates. Now they’re paying private sector wages that’ll run into many tens of billions. And we still might see unemployment rise by a million.

I think it is the right thing to do but it is (necessarily) huge.

Taxpayers will be paying this back for years - I agree its the right thing to do - the bond market will be strong as investors look for safe havens to put money.

It will be interesting to see how much of the 300bn of loans will be taken up and at what interest rates. Even with a government guarantee the banks will only lend to viable businesses.

The debt levels will no doubt reach eye watering levels, but it will almost certainly cost the taxpayer less to pump in the support now in the hope that we can return to something close to normal productivity after the pandemic is over, than allowed businesses to go to the wall and then had to pay the bills of long-term unemployment for years.

Also we had very high debt levels after the war but managed to rebuild the housing stock, set up the NHS and public industries and have close to full employment for the next few decades and the debt was dealt with.

Debt levels became politicised by Osborne and Cameron as they had an opportunistic line of attack after Labour rescued the banking sector to keep credit lines around in 2008/09 and they could then paint Labour as being reckless with public money. Same as the "Tea Party" Republicans in the US attacking Obama for his rescue measures.

The politics of it had changed even before the pandemic as Boris and Cummings are not austerity hawks (supposedly the reason Sajid Javid was booted out was because he was not enthusiastic about Cummings spending plans for regenerating the north). And in the US, Trump has been driving up the US deficit ever since taking over from Obama, he has not cared about the budget balance.

Assuming Labour and the Democrats don't suddenly discover a taste for being austerity enthusiasts I don't think there will be the same political clamour for slashing everything. More likely to take the John Major/Ken Clarke approach to dealing with a 6 to 7 per cent budget deficit in the 1990s: restraint on spending combined with wide spreading, low-impact tax rises which virtually got rid of it in 5 years. You could do the same as that but over a decade. The aggressive austerity just slows the deficit reduction plan anyway by reducing your ability to grow.

One thing which helps governments in a time of economic uncertainty is that there is always a big demand for the relatively most safe form of investment. Even if everything is more risky, private sector assets are more risky than public sector assets. So whilst the risk of default from a government might be greater now than it was before, it may have become safer in relative terms than holding many other assets that have become exponentially more risky. The extra demand for government bonds then drives up the price of the bonds and hence the interest rate on them falls.

After the financial crisis, the countries that got in to trouble with debt unsustainability, because the interest on their borrowing skyrocketed, were the ones trapped in the Eurozone like Greece, Portugal. There it's an issue of cash flow, because of not having an independent central bank. In the UK, in a short-term cash flow crisis, the UK government can just meet its existing obligations to creditors by issuing new bonds that the Bank of England can buy up (pumping more cash in to circulation). You can't do that as a long term strategy as it will just ratchet up inflation, but the owner of UK government debt at least knows that in extremis the government can pay them back through that approach, and they will then reassess whether they want to hold any UK debt in the future. If you held Portuguese or Greek debt though, you had no such security as they don't have independent central banks and the ECB won't do that for individual countries. Hence although they had lower budget deficits than the UK did in the early 2010s, they paid much higher rates of interest on their borrowing than we did.

Quote ="sally cinnamon"In the UK, in a short-term cash flow crisis, the UK government can just meet its existing obligations to creditors by issuing new bonds that the Bank of England can buy up (pumping more cash in to circulation).'" Have they done that as well? I read something about a new £200 billion, but it might have been for existing bonds... if that makes any difference? Found it: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN2162KT

Quote ="sally cinnamon"In the UK, in a short-term cash flow crisis, the UK government can just meet its existing obligations to creditors by issuing new bonds that the Bank of England can buy up (pumping more cash in to circulation).'" Have they done that as well? I read something about a new £200 billion, but it might have been for existing bonds... if that makes any difference? Found it: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN2162KT

I absolutely think the government is doing the right thing - and if that takes higher taxation rather than forced austerity surely that is a good thing. There has to be rules around the government-backed loans otherwise the otherwise the low-life's will simply borrow sufficient to clear enough debt to release them from their PG's and close the business and then pre-pack it and start again. Next they will simply undercut properly run businesses and ruin the market.

We have to minimise the job losses - that is crucial to the recovery - and good companies need to be supported through this - they will lead the charge of the recovery when it all calms down. Italy must be a worry - strict social measures have not reduced the death count the opposite has happened. Do we have to accept death on a significant scale is inevitable and move forward on that basis - was the herding strategy combining with social isolation of the old and vulnerable a better option?

Something needs to be done about the self employed but what? It is difficult to get monies to them especially if don't charge VAT - where do you access what is the right level of support.

Just think what the debt levels would have been if either party - especially Labour - had been well into the term. Then the debt levels would have truly eye-watering.

Quote ="Mild Rover"Have they done that as well? I read something about a new £200 billion, but it might have been for existing bonds... if that makes any difference? Found it: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN2162KT'" Bank loans will only be government borrowing if they default - my understanding is the loans will be issued by the normal banks - although my bank was unable to be specific on Friday!!

Quote ="Mild Rover"Have they done that as well? I read something about a new £200 billion, but it might have been for existing bonds... if that makes any difference? Found it: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN2162KT'" Bank loans will only be government borrowing if they default - my understanding is the loans will be issued by the normal banks - although my bank was unable to be specific on Friday!!

The comparison should be with what the numbers would be without those measures. Which we’ll never know because it isn’t be being run as a controlled experiment, but ‘worse currently’ isn’t an unreasonable leap of logic.

The Washington Post article Cronus linked to is pretty good, with the trade-offs for different scales of short-term interventions/restrictions described and explained.

Quote ="Mild Rover":vib06ol3Have they done that as well? I read something about a new £200 billion, but it might have been for existing bonds... if that makes any difference? Found it: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN2162KT'" :vib06ol3 It's the same concept but what is being done now is slightly different as its for existing bonds as you say. When the Bank of England buys all those government bonds now it has two main effects The asset purchase from the BoE will both reduce the rate at which government borrows and also the rate for private sector firms that need to borrow by issuing debt. What's the catch....? The additional cash released in to the system by the BoE will wind up somewhere, which means there is more cash splashing around which is a good thing when you're at risk of recession because the last thing you want is people/businesses that want to buy, being unable to access liquid funds to make a purchase. But it is additional money in the economy, that is not backed up by additional production of goods and services, so in the long run that will wind its way out through prices just adjusting upwards. Same reason that transfer fees in football rise so much - the players today aren't better than Maradona, Baggio, they are just denominated in higher values as there's more cash in the system. So you risk getting inflation. The Bank of England has a tool to stop that because while it has those bonds in its vault it can 'unwind' the asset purchase by just selling them (in practice some of the bonds will have matured but they can get round that by taking the payment due on them and using it to buy new bonds). When it sells the bonds back you get the reverse of the original effect, it sucks cash out of the system and increases the supply of bonds, reducing their price and increasing the rate of interest on the borrowing. So this kind of bond purchase technique is useful if you think you have a short-term recession, you can do it now to tide things over, then as the economy starts to recover and you fear inflation setting in, just slowly 'unwind' it by selling the bonds back. If you have a long-term economic slump though you have a problem! Monetary policy tools like this aren't going to be effective against a long-term slump.

Quote ="Mild Rover":vib06ol3Have they done that as well? I read something about a new £200 billion, but it might have been for existing bonds... if that makes any difference? Found it: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN2162KT'" :vib06ol3 It's the same concept but what is being done now is slightly different as its for existing bonds as you say. When the Bank of England buys all those government bonds now it has two main effects The asset purchase from the BoE will both reduce the rate at which government borrows and also the rate for private sector firms that need to borrow by issuing debt. What's the catch....? The additional cash released in to the system by the BoE will wind up somewhere, which means there is more cash splashing around which is a good thing when you're at risk of recession because the last thing you want is people/businesses that want to buy, being unable to access liquid funds to make a purchase. But it is additional money in the economy, that is not backed up by additional production of goods and services, so in the long run that will wind its way out through prices just adjusting upwards. Same reason that transfer fees in football rise so much - the players today aren't better than Maradona, Baggio, they are just denominated in higher values as there's more cash in the system. So you risk getting inflation. The Bank of England has a tool to stop that because while it has those bonds in its vault it can 'unwind' the asset purchase by just selling them (in practice some of the bonds will have matured but they can get round that by taking the payment due on them and using it to buy new bonds). When it sells the bonds back you get the reverse of the original effect, it sucks cash out of the system and increases the supply of bonds, reducing their price and increasing the rate of interest on the borrowing. So this kind of bond purchase technique is useful if you think you have a short-term recession, you can do it now to tide things over, then as the economy starts to recover and you fear inflation setting in, just slowly 'unwind' it by selling the bonds back. If you have a long-term economic slump though you have a problem! Monetary policy tools like this aren't going to be effective against a long-term slump.

Eventually god willing we will overcome this virus, the debt to the country will be massive. Companies will be bankrupt or trading with very little cash reserves. The only crumb of comfort will be all of Europe will be starting afresh with the same high debt. The exception will be Italy, potentially they will be hardest hit as they started off from a weak position. Without restarting the Brexit debate again, the eu have some massive decisions to make regarding loans to various countries. On top of which poor old Greece have the massive problem of migrants. Which certainly won’t go away and now summer is on the way will intensify. Depressing times indeed, you can’t even go to the pub for a couple of pints.

Austerity v2.0 - harder, deeper, much more savage.

I think it will be higher taxation - I doubt any government will get away with years of austerity - it will be tough enough

Want to bet? This is a global pandemic, not just bankers playing silly sods with subprime mortgages.

I can already hear the soundbites 10 years down the line - "austerity was necessary".

Austerity round 2 will be very difficult politically for this Conservative government:

Their core vote is now the north/midlands 'red wall' areas which they won in 2019. This is largely a Brexit-voting, socially conservative part of the demographic who bought in to Boris' positivity and vision of Britain's great future after Brexit. I would guess that the general consensus opinion amongst these voters is that this shut down is needless, tens of thousands of people die of flu every year and we don't shut the economy down because of it, they will be angry at the government for shutting everything down and leading to many of them losing their jobs or their businesses going to the wall. A number of right-wing commentators are also stirring them up with this viewpoint. So Boris, who was used to being the flagbearer of the populist opinion on Brexit "the establishment have tried to cheat us out of democracy", is going to have to be the one telling people what they don't want to hear - it was necessary, listen to the experts, we know better than you about what is in your best interests, blah blah, which will make him sound like "the establishment".

The public was already tired of austerity which is why Boris pivoted away from it and he had sold Brexit as something which was going to mean more money for public services. He isn't temperamentally suited to giving the public a puritanical lecture that they have lived beyond their means and now must be punished for their reckless indulgence by having their health services, transport, schools etc scaled back. Cameron and Osborne did that because they could say "don't blame us blame Labour". Boris won't have anyone to blame but himself.

Now he can say, with justification, that shutting down the economy was necessary to protect public health and save lives, and ironically the people who will agree with him on this are going to be the liberal middle class Remainer types, who hate him anyway so still won't vote for him. The problem will be, convincing the core audience that he wants to appeal to, that this decision to shut the economy down, lose their jobs and businesses, was necessary when they don't believe it is. And he will need to convince them strongly of it to get them to stomach austerity.

Boris may end up in the worst of both worlds, where he shuts down the economy a few weeks later than they did in other countries, and we still get a horrendous death toll. Then one section of the electorate will say, Boris has blood on his hands because he didn't act quickly enough and that led to excess deaths. The other section of the electorate will say, we paid with our jobs and businesses and for what - loads of people died anyway. The right wing press are also likely to push that argument too. So unlike Brexit, Boris is now in a position where he's in the impossible position of being unpopular either way. That is completely not suited to his personality, and he has also made a lot of enemies within his own party ranks due to the way he treated other Conservatives on his route to power.

Brutal but accurate.



This seems likely and there’s a part of me that wonders if his lifelong run of luck has come to sudden and spectacular end just as he has grasped the prize he wanted so badly. His reputation really is in the hands of the metaphorical gods. Along with many thousands of lives in the U.K.

My best, albeit remote, hope is the virus mutates into a less deadly but faster spreading strain that produces cross-immunity. Boris as the new Churchill in popular opinion is a puke-inducing prospect but a price I’m sure we’d all accept if we could.

I think Sunak will lead the party into the next election - he has come across very well, decisive, accurate, compassionate and intelligent.