Jo Michell

@jomichell.bsky.social

9605 Followers 1039 Following

Professor of economics at UWE Bristol. Chair of Post-Keynesian Economics Society. Progressive Economy Forum council member. Interested in macro, finance, banking, climate change, inequality, demographics. https://people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/JoMichell

I confess I am surprised-and a little unnerved by my own surprise. Given what I thought I knew about oil shocks, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz for 4½ months should have been an economic catastrophe on the order of 1973 or 1979. A quarter of seaborne oil and a fifth of the world's LNG ran through that channel. And yet: Brent touched $126 in April, fell back to $71 by early July, and has only now clawed back above $95. That is a serious disruption. It is not a global economic catastrophe like 1973 or 1979. Not yet at least. Why not?
In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for Al training data because they don't include Al generated text.
Two maps of the density of manufacturing jobs in the UK in 1981 and 2018.
FT headline: Andy Burnham opens door to using ‘flexibility’ within fiscal rules
"Shabana is certainly the lesser of evils," said Sir Martin Sorrell, executive chair of S4 Capital. "She is a serious person and definitely better news than Ed Miliband. The problem remains that Burnham and his team haven't had long to prepare. She has no time to plan and no financial wriggle room."
The negative effects are larger among children with more educated parents. This pattern may seem surprising if one expects more educated households to be better able to guide children’s use of technology. One possible explanation is differential take-up: households with more educated parents may have been more likely to switch to fibre optic plans once the infrastructure became available. Another possibility is that the opportunity cost of changes in adult–child interactions is higher in households where these interactions would otherwise be more developmentally productive.
But one person briefed on the plan said: "Shabana is nailed down as chancellor. That's definitely happening." Markets responded positively to the prospect of a chancellor coming from the right of the Labour Party.
Supporters of Mahmood, who is seen as a tough and effective home secretary, say the former barrister would be prepared to take on Treasury orthodoxies, although she has not held any economic roles as a minister,
Miliband's promotion of radical net zero policies has earned him enemies among some trade unions, with Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, saying his appointment to the Treasury would be a "noose around job creation" in Britain.
With Andy Burnham now about to enter Downing Street, the question is whether there is a third option. In an interview with the New Statesman last September, Burnham made a throwaway remark he has not been allowed to forget: ‘We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets.’ Fund managers lined up to express their dismay, sounding dire warnings about what lay ahead if Burnham were allowed into power. Since then, the press – led by the usually more circumspect Financial Times – has been like a dog with a bone, chasing down bond market analysts for apocalyptic visions of Burnhamism, treating vox pops conducted within the Square Mile as the expression of pure economic reason.
Analysis in this report leads with quantitative analysis using fiscal and economic metrics. This choice reflects an observation that fiscal constraints present the first barrier to action, and recognition that fiscal discipline is a valuable reflection of underlying biophysical constraints. This limits the report to focussing on substantiating the effects on social and physical resilience using economic values. Analysis of the strengthened social cohesion and elevated efficacy of collective decision-taking would require post-factum qualitative analysis beyond the scope of this report, and so are speculative outcomes of the programme.
The Appendices are substantially outputs at the conclusion of research activities with AI support. The Claude Opus (4.6-4.8) AI models have been used to research background data and develop models to support budgets and distributional impacts of individual policies using directions, instructions, and prompts from the author. All AI inputs, models, and outputs have been reviewed by the author. The propserity2030.uk website is built in collaboration with Claude and uses the Astro framework. The website includes an Ask page that allows natural language query of only the report's contents, results generated using the Anthropic API, Sonnet model.
Greenspan attended George Washington High School from 1940 until he graduated in June 1943; one of his classmates was John Kemeny.[16] He played clarinet and saxophone along with Stan Getz. He further studied clarinet at the Juilliard School from 1943 to 1944.[17] Among his bandmates in the Woody Herman band[18] was Leonard Garment, Richard Nixon's special counsel.[19] He reported to a draft board for potential military service in World War II and was rejected as medically unfit in 1944 due to a spot on his lung.[20]
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/05ab5df6-877b-4e5a-a01d-de9f19b52b37?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Andy Burnham needs to tackle the UK’s “unsustainable” public finances quickly to minimise the risks to the economy, the UK’s fiscal watchdog has warned. Even if the UK takes urgent action, the Office for Budget Responsibility said spending cuts or tax rises equivalent to more than £100bn a year would be required to stabilise debt at 95 per cent from 2030-31 onwards.
The OBR's famous exponential growth in debt/GDP graphs.
The Labour movement's hostility is more brazen. Evidence suggests that software developed in partnership with Palantir, for instance, was able to reduce sepsis deaths at a Florida hospital by 68 per cent, saving 900 lives in four years. Yet Labour has tried repeatedly to block it - there is a sense that the movement would rather people die than allow Peter Thiel near the NHS.
Nor does Burnham have a convincing view of the causes of growth. If there is one thing we know, it is the critical importance of technological progress, driven by the discovery of ever more creative and ingenious new ideas. That is the lesson of the work by Peter Howitt, Joel Mokyr and Philippe Aghion that won the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics. But it is not how Burnham thinks about growth - his Manchester speech did not even mention Al.
I was disappointed to see the FT reporting warnings of "a new black hole in the public finances" (September 9). A black hole is an astronomical body so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping. It is not the difference between a relatively arbitrary target and an uncertain forecast. As the BBC has acknowledged, journalists have a responsibility to take particular care when reporting on the public finances. Misleading and emotive metaphors should not be used -at least without caveat or quotation marks - in a serious newspaper such as the FT. Jo Michell Professor of Economics, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Alex Wickham ® @alexwickham • 1h X Defence barely mentioned by Burnham on Tuesday but it could define his premiership whether he likes it or not. He has to immediately find £5b to fill the black hole. Then tens of billions more to meet future UK commitments. That's the reality of governing over the next 5/10 yrs...
A policy paper issued Tuesday by the Treasury stated that £4.7bn of defence spending until 2030 will have to be found in the next Budget, meaning wrangling is likely to continue under the next prime minister, expected to be Andy Burnham. While Burnham had been briefed on aspects of the defence plan in advance, he was blindsided by the funding gap on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter.
The speech was taken calmly by the bond market, with the 10-year gilt yield slightly lower on the day at 4.73 per cent, while the pound was up 0.3 per cent at $1.324.
The writer is senior vice-president and economist at Pimco
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research dissected the move in yields in a report at the end of May. It found that the large increase was almost entirely the result of oil price moves and wider turbulence in global bond markets. Those factors had pushed up the yield on 30-year gilts by around o.6 percentage points while increased political risk had added just 0.06 percentage points to longer-dated yields.
Paris is braced for a street party of unprecedented scale tomorrow with more than 2 million people expected to gather for the Fête de la Musique, amid a huge influx of music fans from Britain and warnings of record temperatures. France's annual free street music festival, which has been running for more than 40 years, has grown into the country's biggest cultural event. What was previously a nationwide showcase for local and amateur talent - from village choirs to classical ensembles and techno acts in the capital - has evolved into vast international open-air celebration.
The first eight of a list of 101 theories of the rate of interest.
The Simpsons “worst day” meme.
“THERE IS DEBT EVERYWHERE, AND IN EVERY-thing. Most money in the economy begins life as a loan created by a commercial bank. Debt is right there in our homes, in every Uber and Airbnb, in big sporting events, infrastructure projects “ — from FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE
Miliband is viewed with deep suspicion among business. A different FTSE 100 chief executive said that the combination of Burnham and Miliband would be his “worst nightmare” because they would drive up inflation and gilt yields. 
But, fundamentally, increased spending on publicly subsidised goods and services in an environment of high interest payments requires increases in taxation. There is no avoiding this: fiscal policy is about the distribution of income and, ultimately, if we are to reverse austerity, taxes will need to rise.