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AlfredTMahan

Listed below are comments made by AlfredTMahan between Tuesday, 13th May 2008 and Monday, 9th February 2009.

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It was Balls 10:32pm on 09 Feb 2009 Sorry to see ministers talking down the economy - didn't the visionary Scottish idiot complain bitterly more than once about Osborne doing that? Maybe he should match his actions to his words for once and sack Balls...
2008: The Brown rollercoaster 6:27pm on 20 Dec 2008 Just because you couldn't see what was going to happen doesn't mean it wasn't predictable - plenty of us saw that Brown's policies were leading to the usual Labour denouement of a sterling crisis, and you can read plenty of comments from late 2006 onwards from me, at least, saying just that. I'm nothing special - loads of us foresaw it.

Lots of us also foresee that things are going to get much, much worse very quickly and the government still isn't owning up to it - although the signs are there of panic, such as the decision to stop publishing data on the money supply (i.e. repealing s.6 of the Bank Charter Act 1844) just when the printing presses are about to be turned on. Turn your attention to that - it'd be a proper bit of journalistic investigation for once.
Tories free of spending commitment 10:59am on 18 Nov 2008 Over the weekend, the BBC made much of George Osborne breaking some non-existent convention that the opposition don't comment on the consequences of financial policies, and was thus talking the pound down. This led many news bulletins.

The pound went up yesterday.

Can we now expect a leading item saying that it's obvious Osborne's words had no effect on sterling? I thought not.

I would have thought that investors (who broadly speaking are intelligent people) would be much more worried by biased and inaccurate reporting from the state media than comments by the opposition when assessing a currency risk.

How on earth can the Tories say now what spending in 2011-12 will be? We're all waiting for a statement on what the government is intending to do and all the indications are that it's going to spend money it hasn't got - and a lot of it. That'll damage the economy hugely, as you should know, so we have to see what extent of the damage they cause before knowing what to do.

The cure for too much borrowing is not more borrowing.
Mini Budget 11:15pm on 13 May 2008 78 asks why on earth Brown makes everything so complicated. (1) it's second nature to him - he can't help micro-managing, because he knows best and has never lived on Planet Earth like the rest of us and (2) because of the way targets are measured. By 'giving' money to low-paid families, so their incomes are constant, and increasing tax on poor single people, for instance, he can announce that more children have been lifted out of poverty - because 'poverty' is defined as a relative term, if he makes everyone else poorer fewer children live on less than the 40% (I think) of median earnings defined as the poverty line - even if they are no better off. In my view it's pretty dishonest.

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AlfredTMahan