Gas Boom Has Youngstown Making Steel Again – Bloomberg http://t.co/fDTgCjTZ no question the positive econ impact of shale gas in USA is real
Gas Boom Has Youngstown Making…
January 10th, 2012
Data exclusive to People newsp…
January 8th, 2012Data exclusive to People newspaper today from our platform UKCrimeStats – 50 worst crime streets http://t.co/TUD6PFPP see paper for detail
New post from our platform UKC…
January 7th, 2012New post from our platform UKCrimeStats http://t.co/Uk3mrDMX Crime still falling in the USA – why?
Going green isn’t easy when …
January 5th, 2012Going green isn’t easy when we’re so in the red CityAM: http://t.co/tZ5YcM5d great piece by my IOD colleague Corin Taylor re: our next opus
If only UK could buy nat gas a…
January 4th, 2012If only UK could buy nat gas at $3 rather than >$8 per MMBTU – imported US shale gas will close the gap – Bloomberg http://t.co/5xgxJ0kr
New post & capability from our…
January 3rd, 2012New post & capability from our platform UKCrimeStats http://t.co/OGRMzvb9 – historic street crime data by street
It’s the total size of the debt that makes it expensive . . .
May 17th, 2011Beat this for a sobering bar chart in today’s Wall Street Journal;
The shocker is that while the UK has a lower interest rate than Euroland and can borrow at lower rates than every other major European country other than Germany, we are only just behind most of the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland Greece and Spain) when measured by the total cost to GDP of interest payments on borrowing at 3.1% while Spain is some way down at 2.2%.
I still think the story that the UK was facing bankruptcy etc. was way overblown and at times, silly. As I have argued here and here.
But who wants to spend 3.1% of GDP on interest payments while simultaneously trying to enshrine in law a commitment to Foreign Aid of 0.7%?
On Greenland’s diversified future . . .
September 26th, 2010Earlier this week I was interviewed on Al-Jazeera English about the discovery of gas just off the coast of Greenland by Cairn Energy. As is always the case, whenever there’s a new hydrocarbon find, there is a great deal of excitement which all too often turns out to be unjustified. So I urged some caution mentioning that it can be up to 10 years before oil discovery and bringing it to market. And I daresay a great deal of the oil’s exploitation depends on high prices – which should not be seen as a given.
That said, I couldn’t help but laugh when I found out how unpopular Greenpeace is in Greenland. The route cause of this is their opposition to seal-hunting which pretty much shut down one of their two export industries – seal furs. So I’m not surprised they’re not getting a good reception this time round. And let’s face it, Greenlanders aren’t the sort of people to care what outsiders think of them – they are the only territory to have joined and left the European Union. I can just see Brussels Eurocrats choking on the audacity of that one !
Right now, the biggest industry in Greenland is prawn processing – so it’s only natural they’d want some diversity away from that.
At 17.9% Singapore shows how rich countries can grow fast
August 12th, 2010An annualised figure of 17.9% for growth in the first half of 2010 is pretty staggering for a 5 million strong island nation with GDP per head (on a PPP basis) of $50,000.
When I see figures like this, I wish there was much more interest and debate on how the UK could lift it’s own paltry trend growth rate. Right now it stand at just over 2% and to take us technically out of economic decline, i.e. above the world growth rate, it needs to be about 5% or more.
Instead, we seem to be more interested in tiptoeing around the margins, engaging in the latest fashions like nudge economics, when clearly what we need is an almighty shove !
Nouriel Roubini – the impending threat of negative feedback from weak growth
August 3rd, 2010Amongst my somewhat copious pile of holiday reading books, I have a hardback edition of Crisis Economics by Nouriel Roubini – aka Dr. Doom – which I much look forward to reading (after finishing ploughing through Tom Bower’s weighty tome on Oil – Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century – of which more, later).
Roubini, you should know, is the man who told a sceptical crowd of senior economists at the IMF in September 2006 that “. . . the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession”. According to the New York Times “. . . he then laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac“.
Well, I hardly need tell you that he has the great privilege of knowing that he was right. So that’s why I can’t help but play close attention to what he said a week ago on CNBC because if anything, we have all failed to listen enough to the pessimists;
The long and short of it is if US growth is much less than capacity of 2.75-3.00% and comes in at 1.5% as he thinks, there will be net job losses rather than net job creation, aggregate demand will go down, negative feedback kicks in and the risk of a double dip recession rises dramatically.
So if, as per my earlier post, you accept that the UK is 6 months behind the USA, then I suspect these problems will hit us from the 1st quarter of 2011.
