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Gordon Biggest Waster Since 1983
2007-03-13 14:07:00
It appears that when Gordon vacates number 11 later this year, he will leave behind a legacy of tax-and-spend that sees the Government’s spending as the largest share of national income for nearly a quarter of a century. But it’s all alright for him, as when the house of cards collapses he can simply ...
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House Price Backlash
2007-03-11 00:24:00
The media over the past few years, in reporting inflation and rumours about it’s true levels, has worked on the general principle that rises in the prices of essential commodities are a bad thing, and that the government and Gordon Brown are cleverly trying to hide them from us by sleight of hand.  There is ...
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Highest Taxes In 20 Years
2007-03-07 07:24:01
Newspapers are reporting today that the International Monetary Fund has sent a severe warning to the “Iron Chancellor”, that taxation is at breaking point and public spending must be slashed to avoid disaster for Britain’s public finances.  The news will come as a blow to tax-and-spend Gordon Brown, who has in the past 10 years shown his love for all things civil service by pumping cash into the public sector. The IMF also warned that there is a “significant chance” of a fall in house prices, an event that - if it were to happen - would surely spell disaster for an economy built on debt, perpetual house price inflation, and consumer spending funded by second mortgages.  The IMF also urged the Bank of England that interest rates must be upped to 5.5%, and soon, to avoid sending the economy into an inflationary spiral. The IMF calculated the tax burden, based on the ratio of taxation to Gross Domestic Product, is now at 38%, a level last seen in the mid 1...
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Gordon Brown Betfair Update
2007-03-03 19:21:01
It has been a few months since the last time we checked on Gordon ’s prospects in the Betfair markets, so lets see how he’s doing now. Then we will gauge reaction to his Budget speech in a few weeks time by checking on the odds again afterwards. In the “Next Labour Leader” market, we can see that Gordon’s odds are now 1.29, significantly shorter than September’s odds of 1.45. Things are starting to shake out in the leadership race, and it is also a lot clearer now that Blair is likely to stand down soon, so Brown has less time to make any “cock ups” and therefore a better chance of winning. There are, however, two more interesting things to note in the market. Firstly the odds of Brown’s nearest challenger David Milliband have come in significantly to only 11.0. Betfair are good enough to provide charts of how the odds have changed over time and these are displayed below: So a serious challenger has emerged in Milliband, alb...
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Gordon Lines Up Public Sector Pay Cuts
2007-03-02 07:19:01
Desperate to save as much money as possible to balance the books, Gordon has announced that public sector wages will increase by an average of 1.9% in this years pay round.  Given that RPI, the traditional measure of inflation used when calculating pay increases, is currently running at 4.2%, this makes a real terms wage cut of 2.3% for the public sector, or £38 a month for a civil servant earning £20,000 a year.  Gordon is truly stuck between a rock and a hard place this time around - he is potentially throwing away the votes of over 6 million public sector workers - votes he cannot afford to lose if recent polls are anything to go by.  On the other hand, he is currently about 20 billion pounds in the hole with public sector finances, so every pound saved is vital.  The third aspect to the conundrum is the spectre of wage inflation that faces Gordon head-on.  If wage inflation spirals out of control as some say it might, interest rates will eventually have to be risen to match, whi...
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Front Page Pain For Gordon
2007-02-28 19:17:04
A couple of nasties for Gordon have hit the front pages this week.  The Times and the Telegraph brought us these headlines: First of all, the Daily Telegraph gave us the frontpage seen on the right here, with the headline Brown losing his touch on the economy, say voters.  The Telegraph/YouGov poll is the second bad result in two days for Gordon, following on from the Guardian/ICM poll the day before that said he is currently completely failing to convince the country that he would make a better prime minister than David Cameron.  The Telegraph gave these results in their article, also highlighting some of the problems that Gordon has run into lately: Gordon Brown is losing his reputation for economic competence and failing to convince voters he would make a better prime minister than David Cameron, a Daily Telegraph-YouGov poll shows today. The Conservatives are now seen as more likely than Labour to run the economy well ? the most significant turnaround in the public’s v...
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Gordon Getting Spanked In The Polls
2007-02-28 19:17:04
Not much of a happy 56th Birthday for Gordon on Tuesday, as The Guardian reported that he is now trailing Cameron by 13 points in the latest opinion poll: Gordon Brown is failing to persuade the public that he would make a better prime minister than David Cameron, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today which suggests the Conservatives could win a working majority at the next general election. Voters give the Tories a clear 13-point lead when asked which party they would back in a likely contest between Mr Brown, Mr Cameron and Sir Menzies Campbell. The result would give the party 42% of the vote against Labour on 29%, similar to its performance under Michael Foot in 1983. The Liberal Democrats would drop to 17%. The result is the highest that the Conservatives have scored in any ICM poll since July 1992, just after their last general election victory. Pretty unhappy birthday all around for Gordon then.  It is now just under a month to go until Gordon makes what will probab...
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Debt, Debt and More Debt
2007-02-28 19:17:04
Unsurprisingly this weekend we were greeted with the news that the National Debt has now passed the £500bn mark.  In a “miracle” economy whose foundations are built entirely upon debt, debt and more debt, the news that the country owes more money than ever before can hardly come as a shock to anyone.  Gordon has slowly but surely sunk us further and further into the mire, and it’s now anyone’s guess as to whether the house of cards can be supported long enough for him to make the switch nextdoor. One of the gigantic pits in which our money appears to be gathering is the coffers of various Private Finance Initiative companies, who are seeing profits beyond their wildest dreams, just so Gordon can keep a bit of the countries mammoth debts off his balance-sheet. One of the more recent symptoms of the whole spiral of debt beginning to unravel seems to have been the fact that even the grossly fudged CPI measure of inflation is hitting new heights, with the Office ...
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Gordon Is To Blame
2007-02-28 19:17:04
While he desperately scrabbles around attempting to draw our attention elsewhere, a few home truths seem to be dawning on the general public about the true state of the british economy.  The fact that a 0.25% rise in interest rates comes as a shock to people while inflation is way over it’s 2.0% target at 2.7% (and likely to climb even higher when figures are released on Tuesday), gives some picture of how foggy the general public conciousness continues to be on the subject of the economy. This news, however, appears to be making at least some sit up and take notice, not least the Daily Telegraph, where we are reminded that any oncoming hardship is most likely to be all Gordon ’s fault: With typical dishonesty, Gordon Brown’s apologists were quick to say that he would support the Bank of England’s aggressive (and, in my view, entirely correct) monetary policy in the interests of sound money. But this is a man whose borrowing addiction and spend...
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Gordon Drowns Us In Debt
2007-02-28 19:17:04
The Telegraph has an early christmas present for Gordon , reminding us all of how hopelessly debt-ridden his economic miracle has become.  Highlights include the following: The truth is that the “Iron Chancellor” has long shown a cavalier attitude towards fiscal management. Year after year, his borrowing has turned out to be much higher than his forecasts. Last week’s PBR ? less an economic statement than the latest staging post in a remorseless political campaign ? was a classic Brown performance. Drunk on ambition, he did nothing to acknowledge the true scale of his liabilities, or the fact that his fiscal rules lie in tatters. Yet the man who presents himself as our next prime minister is living in a never-never land of debt. It has become painfully clear just how wrong Gordon’s predictions on debt have actually been: In his budget five years ago, the Chancellor said he would borrow a total of £28bn between 2001 a...
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Gordon Wastes Millions Propping Up Housing Bubble
2007-02-28 19:17:04
The desperation of Gordon to keep house prices rising and therefore keep the public borrowing was demonstrated again yesterday with the announcement of the Open Market HomeBuy scheme which has been designed to help key workers buy their first house.  The possibility that the reason they cannot afford to buy a house in the traditional fashion lies with the vastly overinflated debt bubble that the UK finds itself in today has been all but ignored, and Gordon has decided instead that the best course of action is to continue inflating debt and waste £230 million in the process on a scheme which will only help around 20,000 people.  The other obvious implication is that the salaries of teachers, nurses etc. determined largely by the government are set too low and eroded each year by pay rises linked to the massively fiddled inflation figures of CPI at roughly 2%, when the cost of living is increasing at a rate far far higher.  The likelihood, as pointed out by the RICS, that assistance f...
More About: Housing Bubble , Lion , Housing , Sing , Lions

Circus Comes To Town
2007-02-28 19:17:04
This week the Circus is in town and the new Ringmaster opened proceedings today with a predictable speech, going down like meat in a butcher’s shop.  Familiar promises on issues from education to the economy were trotted out, to an audiance of virtually unanimous favour.  In a familiar mixture of magic, illusion and religion, Gordon set out a safe-bet plan which demonstrated that very little is likely to change under his leadership, and that the mistakes of the past have not been learned from and are highly liable to be repeated, let alone corrected.  Fiddled figures on unemployment, recently pulled apart in the press, were bare facedly reiterated for the umpteenth time. It has not been the best of times recently for Gordon, since the happy events of a few weeks ago that saw his predecessor virtually decapitated by his own party.  Today’s speech may have gone some way to repairing the damage of press comments of the past few days, but how permanent the patching-up exerci...
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Gordon?s Honeymoon Period
2007-02-28 19:17:04
Recent political events make it look very likely that Gordon will get his greatest wish within the next 12 months and accede to the throne of Number 10 Downing Street. Like most new Prime Ministers before him, Gordon will doubtless be expecting the privilege of a honeymoon period, in which the press lays off their customary day-by-day attacks on the incumbent PM for at least a few months while he gets his feet under the desk. Evidence is steadily mounting, however, that this may not be the case for Gordon. In fact, now that it appears that the toppling of Blair is fully complete, the press seem to have already declared open season on our dear chancellor, racing to get the early punches in to soften him up. This recent Observer article, for example, can be summed up with the following verdicts on Gordon’s performance: Tax and benefits: Good if you are on a low income or have children. Bad if you are on a high income or are childless. Homes and Inheritance: Bad for homeowners...
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US Sneezes, Gordon Catches Cold
2007-02-28 19:17:04
The outlook for our friends across the pond appears to be looking bleaker by the day, as an economy fed by rampant house price inflation on a scale never seen before, and subsequent mortgage equity withdrawl, looks to be heading into reverse at a very rapid pace.  What is surprising is not that the US housing market has popped after 17 consecutive rate rises by the Federal Reserve, but that the rapid U-turn in sentiment has been so widely reported by the British press, who have been well known to keep any bearish housing market stories under wraps in their bid to sell papers.  Some commentators are drawing sinister conclusions as to what may be in store for the American people in general, should their recession prove particularly bad.  Still, I suppose just because it is happening in America, that shouldn’t affect Britain in any way, should it? Gordon is certainly hoping so.  Against all the odds, perhaps the oft-used proverb that when “America sneezes, the world catches...
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Gordon?s Open Market HomeBuy Scheme A Complete Failure
2007-02-28 19:17:04
It seems that Gordon’s plans to help first time buyers onto the housing “ladder” have been met with total and abject failure, after the Telegraph revealed today that only 100 buyers have taken up the offer of the key workers scheme.  The Government had targeted 6,500 completions a year, and yet has managed only a fraction of that since the scheme was launched over a year ago, in late 2005.  Seems as though Gordon may be planning a rescue strategy in his Budget speech due on March 21st, although with the failure already there for all to see it’s hard to believe he can do much good to rescue the situation now.  The article has more: Just 100 first-time buyers have taken out mortgages under the Government’s pioneering shared-equity home ownership scheme with the private sector. The Chancellor unveiled “Open Market Home buy” with much fanfare in late 2005, setting a target of using the partnership to lift 20,000 key workers onto the housing ladde...
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