Thatâs lord Ashcroft. Donât forget Crispin odious says the reason wasnât brexit, but, and I quote âremainers who are anti-governmentâ. Laughable.
Not quite yet.
Some piece from the FT, the bolded in particular;
Into Brideshead Revisited, near the middle, Evelyn Waugh crowbars a scene on a cruise ship for the express purpose of mocking Americans. There is a character named âSenator Stuyvesant-Oglanderâ. Each and every drink has ice in it. No one is able to tell friendship from desperate bonhomie. The crustiest of Englandâs great novelists wrote better stuff, no doubt, but the passage is an illuminating fragment of a time when anti-Americanism was a Tory thing.
And one that had its uses. If nothing else, Britainâs establishment was clear back then that America was a different country. A midsized archipelago couldnât look to a resource-rich market of continental magnitude for governmental ideas.
If anti-Americanism was bad, look what its opposite has done. Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. The UK does not issue the worldâs reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It canât, as US Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future will trim public spending. Reaganism was a good idea. Reaganism without the dollar isnât. If UK premier Liz Truss has a programme, though, that is its four-word expression.
So much of what Britain has done and thought in recent years makes sense if you assume it is a country of 330 million people with $20 trillion annual output. The idea that it could ever look the EU in the eye as an adversarial negotiator, for instance. Or the decision to grow picky about Chinese inward investment at the same time as forfeiting the European market. Or the bet that Washington was going to entertain a meaningful bilateral trade deal. Superpowers get to behave with such presumption.
Why does Britain think that it can, too? Donât blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Blame the distorting effect of language. Because the UKâs governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesnât help is the freakish fact that Britainâs capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of Americaâs. You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations seem comparable.
Reaganism without the dollar: this isnât one womanâs arbitrary whim. It is the culmination of decades of (unreciprocated) US focus in a Robert Caro-hooked Westminster. You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the worldâs best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who canât name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November. The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting.
The left is as culpable as Truss. From 2010 to 2015, critics of âausterityâ urged the Tories to take the softer US approach. The cross-Atlantic comparison implied that then prime minister David Cameron had King Dollar behind him. Soon after came the importation of identity politics from a republic with a wholly different racial history.
The anti-Americanism of the Waugh generation was petulant. It was sourness at the imperial usurper dressed up as high taste. But at least it had no illusions. The snobs understood that America was alien, and inimitable. Tories who patronised the US â Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath â were quicker than much of the Labour Party to see that Britain belonged with Europe.
Truss and her cohort of Tories have none of that snide but ultimately healthy distance from the US. Take her vaunted supply-side revolution. Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isnât. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesnât have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries.
Some readers balked last month when I wrote that Truss might not last until the next election. Even I didnât think she would trip so soon. It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower.
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Look brass tacks here lads, what does this mean for your average EPL day tripper heading to London,Manchester or Liverpool to see his or her heroes in action? Club shop or street hawker for merch? Nandos or the chippy? Night on the tiles or an Aldi six pack back in the hostel? These are the big questions that need answeringđ
No it got close to parity during the height of banking collapse
Itâs broken 90 a few times over the years. But it is certainly a rarity
Might head to UK for me winter break this year. Havenât been to Edinburgh in a while
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Youâll be like a king over there, be like Turkey or somewhere with them asking you to pay in euros rather than the local currency
Cheaper to take a taxi than a bus as you pay for a bus before the journey starts.
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Iâll be honest, I donât understand a lot of this stuff. What exactly is run on pension funds?
I think itâs because pension funds hold govt bonds as their liquid assets
Defined pension funds use so-called Liability Driven Investment (LDI) funds, designed to ensure they have enough assets to cover future liabilities.
But the volatility in the markets have meant pension funds who hedged against low yields facing sudden demands to pump more cash into LDIs.
That has in turn made some sell gilts to realise cash, forcing prices down - and yields up because fewer people want to buy them.
The Bank stepping into buy long-term gilts over the next fortnight means that prices should come down, reducing the pressure and allowing pension funds time to adjust.
Threadneedle Street will be purchasing up to ÂŁ5billion of 20-year plus gilts from today, every weekday until October 14.
The purchases will be financed from Bank reserves.
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The Brits have a magic money tree too
Kwasi and Liz are playing senior hurling now
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If they hedged against low yields that would mean the higher yields of the last week would be im their favour?
My understanding was that the pension funds holding gilts were looking at huge mark downs and impairments of the gilts therefore leaving them facing huge unfunded liabilties at market pricing, forcing them to sell to shore up capital, resulting in another spiral of bonds diving in value and yields surging. BOE capping the yields and buying lets the pensions restructure in ordely fashion. In short temporary qe to stop gilts from having no buyside.
Well theyâre lining out in the corners.
Lizzie looks to be slowly slithering away from behind kwarteng. Noticeable that the MSM are now honing in on images of kwarteng on his own.
Wouldnât this mean BOE creating more money to use on spending which leads to more inflation?