Monthly Archives: May 2005

Just In Time?

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Tony Blair inched home to a historic Labour third term in the UK last week. But looking at the changing tempo of the British economy over the last couple of months, you could be tempted to ask: was this a case of ‘just in time’ electioneering?

At the present time there seems to be a general consensus that Blair will back down during this parliament, and that the natural heir apparent is Economics Minister Gordon Brown. However if Blair won the election despite the Iraq war, and thanks mainly to economic prosperity, we could ask ourselves whether changing winds of fortune might not make the heir rather less apparent when the time for handing over actually comes.
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An Asian IMF?

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Yes, that’s what Bloomberg’s William Pesek suggests we might see evolving. As Pesek notes, the creation of an Asian Monetary Fund would:

“have major consequences for the global elites and the so-called “Washington Consensus” on how developing nations should go about raising living standards for their swelling and often poor populations.”

In particular, if this came off, not only would we be talking about a European social model, we would also be looking at an Asian one.
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ECB: Rate Cut In The Autumn?

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Despite a widespread feeling that interest rates in Europe may be about to rise, futures markets seem near to pricing in a rate cut for the second half of the year.

One interesting knock-on consequence of this that no-one seems to be twigging is that any such move might well cramp the style of Alan Greenspan over at the US Federal Reserve. To date everyone is imagining that interest rates in the US will continue to rise at a ‘measured’ or ‘not so measured’ pace. But with the current account deficit to worry about there will be a limit to how far Greenspan can push the difference in rates (or spread) without driving up the dollar, something I’m sure he dearly wants to avoid doing.
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When Sorry Is The Hardest Word

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Vladimir Putin, speaking in Moscow today, paid tribute to the courage of “all Europeans who resisted Nazism.” He also stated something which for my generation seems to be simply a fact: that the war?s most ?ruthless and decisive? events had unfolded within the Soviet Union, whose sacrifice of 27m citizens had underpinned the Allied victory. Had the Stalin-Hitler pact held, the war in Western Europe would probably have looked very, very different. However, as the FT notes:

Mr Putin stopped short of issuing the apology demanded by the Baltic states for the four decades of Soviet occupation that followed the war. He also made no reference to the post-war division of Europe.

Why is it sometimes so hard to say sorry?
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Locusts, or Incongruency Revisited.

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It seems we’re not the only ones who are beginning to see governance model incongruencies behind some of the German economic ills (see two of my last posts (1, 2), and, especially the comments to the last one).

Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell (who knows Germany well, having beeen a research fellow at the The Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) gets a bit angry at the Economist for their usually biased coverage of Continental European social and economic models, before declaring his support for Franz M?ntefering.
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The new Doctor Who

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Anybody else been watching the new Doctor Who?

I was always a bit lukewarm towards the show when I was a kid – it seemed slow moving and awfully cheesy by 80’s standards – but I’m really starting to like the new version. So far, it’s lampooned the rush to war in Iraq only a couple weeks before the election – “massive weapons of destruction” indeed – and now has gone on to attack 24-hour cable news in last night’s episode. I don’t remember the old Doctor having such political content.

The Dalek episode, though, was pure fan service.
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Changing Perspectives On Immigration.

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Views of immigration are changing. Back in the mists of time, when I first came to the conclusion that ongoing demographic changes were going to be important, the voices in favour of a reconsideration of immigration policy were few and far between. Perhaps the first and most notable of these voices was the UN population division. Now things are different, and a series of recent international conferences and reports highlighting the positive advantages of immigration as an economic motor only serve to underline the fact that discussion of this important topic is very much back on the agenda.
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General Counting.

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Her Majesties’ subjects have spoken again. It’s just that we don’t know yet what exactly they have said. Well, a majority among them will have probably sighed a little in the booth and then more or less resignedly or enthusiastically ticked off the box next to their local Labour candidate, thus likely ensuring Blairs “historic” second and a half term in office. Earlier, Exit polls predicted a reduced Labour majority of 66 seats.

But because we want to know all this in detail, it is worth mentioning again on top of the page that afoe’s Nick Barlow is blogging the election night over at “What you can get away with” as well as on the 2005 UK General election blog. Here’s why he thinks it’s worth staying up:

“Conservatives take back Putney on a 6.5% swing, Labour hold Newcastle Central but have an 11% swing to the Liberal Democrats. There?s not going to be anything even resembling a uniform national swing tonight, so this could be a long night.”

If that’s still not enough information for the true election junkies among you, then check the list of election bloggers compiled by Chicken Yoghurt. Oh, and before I forget it, the BBC does also offer extensive election coverage including an automatically updating scorecard.