Cityunslicker

Blogging veteran; interests in markets, economics and politics

[Cityunslicker @Cityunslicker]

WallsStreetBets - Suckers gambit! https://t.co/gSQX5m1Bmm

[HeyMan800 @HeyMan800]

Big shout out to the activists at Elliott Management that convinced Southwest Airlines management to stop hedging fuel costs.

[Simon French @Frencheconomics]

UK electricity generation has fallen 25% from its peak in 2004. Per capita electricity consumption is a third the level of the United States. The UK has the most costly electricity in the world. Half the gas we consume comes from the Norwegian side of the North Sea basin. The residual imported LNG has 4x the carbon footprint of supplying our own. And most depressingly of all the result is a deteriorating UK Balance of Payments, a weaker pound, and a bigger hit to the cost of living. And still the useful idiots want to further constrain UK energy production through high taxes, banning new licences, and gold-plating new energy infrastructure. Their luxury beliefs are behind the awful household disposable income growth of recent years. 🤡.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

I get criticised for only complaining about high taxes but not offering solutions. Here’s a few ideas on how to fix the UK economy…

Key Problems:
1. Just 36,000 people are paying more tax than 27Million people combined.
2. Large companies are able to transfer profits into lower tax jurisdictions to avoid UK taxes.
3. Money is being hoarded inside companies as cash.
4. Housing costs are too high and supply is too low.

Key Solutions:

1. Triple the number of high earners and halve the number of non tax payers.

- Reduce top rates of tax to 35%. Reduce the entry level of tax to £10K. Stagger the tax bands more gradually in increments of 5% every £10K of increased earnings (5% on £10k-20K, 10% on £20K-30K, 15% on £30K-£40K…)

- Attract 50,000 overseas investors and entrepreneurs with a revised non-dom scheme based on a fixed fee of £240K per year to cover overseas non-repatriated earnings.

- Incubate 50,000 high-potential individuals. Identify 50,000 people in the top 2% of earners who have the scalability to expand into the top 0.1%.

- Create 2 tier benefits. Premium benefits for short term unemployed or in training. Standard benefits for long term unemployed not learning.

- Create an AI system to deliver life long learning with short courses provided by leading UK Schools/Universities in exchange for VAT free status. All citizens can access this learning system for life. All people on benefits must accumulate learning credits every month to maintain premium benefits. Top employers can receive tax credits for providing approved learning modules on topics relating to open job opportunities.

- Small enterprises with less than 15 employees are subject to reduced regulations for hiring. No minimum wage requirements, reduced NI, no fault dismissal for 2 years. Conditional on employees being informed that they are being hired on these terms.

- Introduce special economic zones outside of London that offer reduced corporation tax for having the main offices located within the zone.

- Introduce a “digital export visa” designed to massively incentive digital businesses to be located in the UK’s special economic zones for digital exports.

2. Get large global companies and digital companies paying tax in the UK.

- foreign companies wishing to sell into the UK must acquire a license to do so if revenue is above £10M. These are fixed fee licenses paid regardless of profit. EG: Facebook/Google pays £600M per year fixed fee to operate its ads business.

3. Get money moving out of companies.

- Exclude business bank accounts from high interest savings accounts above the base rate.

- Allow more deductions. Allow company cars, entertainment expenses. Allow small businesses to claim childcare, nannies, cleaners, cooks and drivers.

4. Make homes more affordable…

- Make residential property building and renovations more tax effective. No/reduced stamp-duty when moving to a smaller, cheaper residential home. Tax credits for bringing dilapidated homes back into the market.

- Interest payments on investment properties attracts a 1% surplus rate of interest used to reduce the national debt.

Let me know which of these you think are sound and which ones you think I may have a blindspot on.

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

What people in the UK are missing here, is that INEOS own the Forties Pipeline System, which is the main North Sea oil pipeline.

Now everyone in the industry knows that Forties Pipeline is going to rundown, so this is the actual sundown moment of North Sea oil.

It’s over.

This is the North Sea equivalent of the last British blast furnaces ceiling collapsing.

This is “Abandon the ship” news for people who understand how the world works. The UK is collapsing under its own hubris.

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

Over the last three years, housebuilding in London has collapsed. Molior recorded just 2,158 private starts in the first half of 2025, around 5% of London’s (low) targets, and still falling.

What is going on? I have posed this question to numerous specialists, most of whom cannot comment publicly for professional reasons. This thread is a summary of what I have gleaned.

[Cityunslicker @Cityunslicker]

@aswren 100% - care home costs eaten all my dad's savings over 5 years.

[Queen Bee @KingBobIIV]

Over the last two weeks, all I've heard from the Labour Party is about the tribulations and trials of The Windrush and the hardships they endured and that, were it not for them "rebuilding Britain" after the war, we wouldnt be who we are today.

I talk about The Road to Wigan Pier a lot because it's harrowing. Orwell wrote it in 1936 after immersing himself into the every day lives of people in Wigan, Sheffield, and Barnsley for several months.

Its books like this, of the many hundreds Ive read of British people throughout our history, that sickens and angers me, when people come a long and try and tell me that nothing these people went through, or lived through mattered, was of value, and that their grandchildren today, likely as poor as they were, are now expected to feel guilty for the behaviour of around 0.4% of wealthy British businessmen, 200 years ago, and that they, now, today, will have to go with even less to pay reparations to people thousands of miles away, that have benefitted immeasurably from the country they created.

From the Road to Wigan Peir:

Orwell going down to the mines -

"You get into the cage, which is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three times as long. It holds ten men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The steel door shuts upon you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops you into the void. You have the usual momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in the cars, but not much sensation of movement till you get near the bottom, when the cage slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is going upwards again. In the middle of the run the cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it touches even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred yards underground. That is to say you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of you . . . But because of the speed at which the cage has brought you down, and the complete blackness through which you have travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at the bottom of the Piccadilly tube.

What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that have to be travelled underground. . . . You see mysterious machines . . . at the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when the roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job . . . You have gone a mile and taken the best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than twenty minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your strength back for several minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with any kind of intelligence

[Cityunslicker @Cityunslicker]

@MerrynSW Moving to UAE next month, no future here.

[Jimmy Rushton @JimmySecUK]

It turns out a key figure behind “Palestine Action” is James "Fergie" Chambers, a wealthy American communist and outspoken supporter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Chambers has spent time in occupied Ukraine and no doubt had extensive contacts with Russian intelligence.

[Cityunslicker @Cityunslicker]

@michaelsoussan @habibi_uk it's not a joke, they wanted them out and we accepted them.

[Cityunslicker @Cityunslicker]

@NiohBerg it's a post-modern re-enactment of the Children's crusade.

[Cityunslicker @Cityunslicker]

@HansChr52239198 @YisraelChaiAdam i can't believe he wrote that,

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

The UK government debt market is not in good shape. Prior to covid it was stable and improving, since covid it is unraveling. You can actually forecast the date of a SovX crisis.

We have £2.8T of debt. Each year we have to refinance £200bn of that outstanding debt and also borrow a new £100bn to pay for deficit spending.

Selling £300bn of Gilts every year is evidently more than the market can absorb, just observe that our Gilt selling is now moving the yield away from us.

As early as 2031, paying the interest on UK government debt will consume every penny of corporation tax revenue.

By 2037 the interest burden will reach the level where an emerging market crisis historically occurs, and the IMF steps in to force ultra strict fiscal measures and capital controls.

If we continue this status quo the NHS and the state pension have around 12 years left, before they are essentially cancelled and restructured under IMF intervention.

[Camilla Tominey @CamillaTominey]

So shocked. Patrick was a phenomenal journalist and a committed campaigner for the causes he truly believed in. He was not just fiercely intelligent but had a quality that is so rare these days: the courage of his convictions. Sending love to his family 💔 https://t.co/lEbBmKFzSz

[max tempers @maxtempers]

This is a horrible idea. The domestic rate is a substantial subsidy. This’ll break a lot of universities fiscally and lead to even further reliance on non-EU students to cover the shortfall.

[Cityunslicker @Cityunslicker]

@sigmatigerfish @robprogressive there are bars everywhere now

[Harrison H. Smith ✞ @HarrisonHSmith]

Let me get this straight...

Israel bombed the shit out of everyone around them for over a year, which eliminated Iran's proxies but pissed off everyone in the world, so now they have a brief window of opportunity to take out Iran, and if they don't, the backlash will be massive, but they can't actually defeat Iran without American troops on the ground, so they are frantically trying to get Trump to launch a war, with Netanyahu visiting DC 3 times in 3 months with nothing to show for it but a bombing campaign against the Houthis. Despite being seemingly surrounded by militant zionists, Trump's team has mostly pursued diplomatic solutions, even talking to Iran against the explicit wishes of Israel. A rift formed between pro-interventionalists like Mike Waltz and anti-interventionalists like Pete Hegseth. Hegseth then started facing immense media pressure, with his top antiwar aides being forced out of the Pentagon on flimsy accusations of leaking. Then Waltz added the editor of leftist magazine The Atlantic to a Signal chat where the Yemen war was being discussed. After the chats were leaked, Hegseth got the brunt of the blowback for some reason and when he refused to resign over it, a second Signalgate scandal was launched to accuse him of sharing classified info to his wife. Waltz, meanwhile, appointed a former member of Israel's Ministry of Defense to oversee Iran and Israel policy on the NSC. Eventually, Waltz was forced to resign after he was discovered co-ordinating with Netanyahu to push a pro-war agenda, in secret and against the orders of Trump. Then in the last few days, Trump has cut off communication with Netanyahu, dropped the requirement for Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, cancelled Hegseth's trip to Israel, and even announced that the US is going to recognize a Palestinian state. Suddenly, its been announced that multiple gigantic, advanced nuclear production facilities have not only been discovered in Iran, but are known to be using material only used in nuclear weapons, not energy production. And Trump leaves for the Mideast on monday. Hoo boy.

[max tempers @maxtempers]

“Many councils spend more on school transport for one child than the annual fees for Eton.”

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

A mob of trans-activists waving death threats at women isn't protest—it's criminal incitement. If the law isn’t enforced, we don’t have equality, we have two-tier justice.

It’s time for Labour to stop being on the side of these extremists and start defending women.

[Miss Jo @therealmissjo]

At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was walking through a park one day in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.

Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.

The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."

Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.

During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.

Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.

"It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the girl.

Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "my travels have changed me." The little girl hugged the new doll and brought the doll with her to her happy home.

A year later Kafka died.

Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written:

"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."