The Kremlin disguised a nearly $100 mn payment to Trump in the form of a brokered real estate deal... and both Jeffrey Epstein and William Pulte were involved in the deal. That's very interesting.

😱

Excellent as ever from @benansell.bsky.social . This sounds like exactly the kind of basic but slightly subtle (and potentially catastrophic) error that these guys would make.

The International Energy Agency once predicted that demand for fossil fuels would peak this decade. But as global commitment to climate change policy fades, so have hopes of hitting "peak oil" any time soon. Here are the IEA's new forecasts. Read the full story on #FTEdit 👉 on.ft.com/47BdLOH

This should be good -- both for content and entertainment.

True. The fact that there are busloads of tourists in Stratford shows that culture is big business. Not supporting it isn't merely philistine; it's also bad economics.

Seconded: it's really hard to fetishise maths after having studied Linear Algebra in any real depth. Like, don't get me wrong, but the mindset you need to cultivate to get good at it is not one that's suited to success in the modern world.

“Woke right” seems to have become a euphemism for racist?

OMG

🙄

Been online long enough to remember when Noah at least pretended to be an economist. Now he's happy to use dollar-terms GDP comparisons as a proxy for his inability to book flights and follow airport signs.

Robbie Gibb was appointed to the BBC Board by Boris Johnson, was an editorial advisor for GB News, and worked as Theresa May's Director of Comms. He is not impartial or neutral. The government should remove him from the Board immediately to protect the BBC's independence.

Excellent piece this

Helluva BBC insider write-up from @lewisgoodall.com here.

The government's reticence over the BBC is coherent with its refusal to confront Reform narratives due to fears of losing 'trust' with voters. Obvious parallels between the unfolding result of BBC's attempts to gain 'trust' with Reform voters, and the likely result for Labour of the same tactics.

Example of how economics gibberish trickles down from the ivory towers to the fund managers, becoming even less coherent on the way.

A surprisingly bad set of labour market stats this morning. The story I was prepared for was "some weakening, but the shake out from the early part of the year is behind us". But it's worse than that - payroll jobs falling again, unemployment now up at 5%. Here is our PN

Gift link: on.ft.com/4455d0e

FT Editorial on the BBC - The broadcaster has made errors, but its board has failed to defend it www.ft.com/content/406e...

This is an interesting take.

NEW: Rachel Reeves signals she intends to remove the two-child cap *in full* "I don't think a child should be penalised because they're in a bigger family through no fault of their own," she tells BBC.

Grimly depressing that someone so directly and obviously connected with the spread of misinformation has so far succeeded in pushing claims about 'bias' at the BBC -- and that you have to really work hard reading the news reports to extract this crucial piece of information.

"systemic", in context means "having material amounts of use for purposes other than crypto speculation on a crypto exchange", which currently describes basically no products and IMO quite possibly never will

Scrapping the cap entirely is both good policy *and* good politics. Half measures will "save" some money short-term, but will piss *everybody* off and still leave very large numbers of children suffering from a policy designed to make them poorer. inews.co.uk/news/politic...

Have there been any suggestions about who leaked the memo?

The BBC will fuck things up from time to time. Lots of major news organisations do; just look at The Times having to memoryhole several fake news stories in a matter of weeks. No one is calling for the abolition of The Times, however. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Objectivity, impartiality and balance are all *different things*, and the lazy tendency to treat them as synonyms, and to use partisan balance alone as a proxy for the others, is the root cause of a vast amount of nonsense.

Stephen really does have the best take on this. It’s not clear that the BBC Board or indeed the rest of the News team really understood the message of the previous reviews, which were about getting detail right. Instead they wanted to know what was ‘biased’ or not like they were blotting out stains.

This isn't a revolutionary government. But as a Labour government, it does need to be the people's representative to the system. So far it's acted as the system's representative to the people - "no, you can't have that, tough choices". And time is running out to deliver outcomes by the election

The key is to raise taxes enough to actually be able to do something with it, beyond placating the OBR and bond markets

Breaking the tax pledge is the right call...and politically sulphurous. Reeves must argue, far more forcefully, that taxes are *the* essential downpayment we all pay for a fairer society. Patrick Diamond and I wrote for @renewaljournal.bsky.social. Key points in 🧵 👇 renewal.org.uk/blog/if-labo...

While going through the proofs for "The British General Election of 2024" (out very soon!) I came across this - Paul Johnson of the IFS's verdict on Labour's manifesto last year. Labour's current attempts to claim the need to break their tax pledges was impossible to forsee don't stack up

I agree with @arusbridger.bsky.social about BBC governance. Although v hesitant about another rearrangement, the single corporate-style board is massively flawed, not least because there needs to be some distance for the governors/board members from editorial decisions

This (not from that piece) is one of those charts where I am completely aware of the data but my mental map of how the global economy works still almost refuses to update to the new reality. Because the pace of change has been so rapid.

Written before the BBC resignations but this by @arusbridger.bsky.social is really worth reading. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/...

Have there been any suggestions about who leaked the memo?

I had my disagreements with the BBC under Tim Davie but he was a decent man doing a difficult job. To see Trump's White House claiming credit for his downfall and attacking the BBC should worry us all.

I don’t suppose there’s any chance that this will be seen by other senior leadership teams as a warning about the prospects of a strategy of attempting to compromise with populist right positions.

Found a fox trapped in a fence earlier today. Unfortunately I was not wearing a kimono.

“Nobody thought a Labour government would have to raise taxes by more than £70bn,” claims one insider in this excellent piece. Shows the problem of the climate of fear in meetings created by some of Starmer’s aides, in that plenty of Labour insiders, did, in fact, think this!

Interested by this comment: what is it about the language of economics that seems insincere in this context, even to an economist?

Odd article. The research paper cited is more like a blog post. And 'model the impact of extinction' is overstating it. As far as I can tell, the Fed authors have just drawn a line on a chart. www.ft.com/content/60df...

"Far from draining our welfare system, migrants are supporting the British state’s solvency." New analysis by @lgilbert.co ukandeu.ac.uk/lower-migrat...

and like I speak to a LOT of gilts investors/analysts and none of them have said this to me. Entirely possible they are talking to other people, who are not in fact in the gilts market, or who are and have different views. Takes two opinions to make a market i guess. 🤔

Hard to think that anybody with experience of UK university senior managements would have confidence that, left to themselves, they'd back academic freedom over an income stream.

The last 15 years of HE policy in the UK: Gov: act like you're in a market! universities: OK Gov: not like that!

Piketty: “I’m sorry that I wrote such long books”. www.ft.com/content/860f...

NEW: Today I co-published a report with think tanks from across the political spectrum. We disagree on many issues, but share common ground on the basics of UK tax reform. Our tax system is riddled with loopholes and irrationalities, holding back growth. This means that..(1/3)

open.substack.com/pub/geoffmul... A lot of very important points in a short post

Ah go on, you can. Comparing the value of my house to my income is not meaningless. Neither is comparing the contents of my son's piggy bank to his weekly pocket money.