don phillips

CEO Society for the Conservation of Angular Momentum. Old Labour, even older Spurs.

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

1. The UK State Pension.
How much is in the "pot"?
How much can the govt afford to pay?
Should we contribute more to private pensions so the government can "borrow" those funds to fund a green transition? A wee thread...🧵👇

[don phillips @donph]

@HavryshkoMarta He's frightened of them.

[don phillips @donph]

@kmflett Been a Spurs supporter since
I was a lad. Faux-hatred of Arsenal had more to do with comedy than football. Wenger's teams were superb. Couldn't fathom why they did not dominate Europe.

[don phillips @donph]

@markmackinnon Le Mans

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

I can't properly describe to anyone under the age of 30 just how cool the Internet was before Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple turned it all into a walled garden of garbage and commerce.

[Leonid Ragozin @leonidragozin]

“Radical centre” today means unhinged militarism, mindless foreign policy extremism, McCarthyist witch-hunt, xenophobia, nazi laundering abroad and trying to emulate far right populists at home while losing to them miserably. A political ideology for immoral conformists on defence industry’s payroll.

[Carol Braun @CarolBraun]

"I think we are misunderstanding efficiency. Efficiency is not about making people's capacity to generate text faster. Efficiency in complex social systems is having really high trust interactions so that we're not slowed down at every interaction by all these questions...

[don phillips @donph]

She looks nice.

[The Silk Road @thesilkroad]

Mogao Caves is located in Dunhuang City, Gansu Province of China. It was built in the year of 366 during the Five Hus & Sixteen States (304 - 439). There are totally 735 caves found so far in the area. In 1987, the UNESCO listed the Mogao Caves as the World Heritage Sites.

[Moose Allain Ꙭ @MooseAllain]

I posted this elsewhere. Some of you might appreciate it.

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

The fact that you've tried to hijack this thread and distract attention from the important economic analysis in the first post proves the point I'm about to make. The linked book explains the destructive 'cultural turn' in detail. Not only are you wrong, you're catastrophically wrong. Important civil rights movements were effortlessly hijacked and incorporated by the right to energise 'progressive neoliberalism'. The belief that inclusion, fairness and equality can be achieved in the neoliberal economic system as it stands became dominant - as the fraud Foucault averred, "let's give the market a chance". Corporate DEI policies systematically promoted individuals representing formerly marginalised groups, making any commitment they had to the left at best tenuous and at worst irrational. It was a clever political move. In neoliberalism's divisive context, the focus on culture and identity created a weak, fragmented and economically illiterate left dominated by middle-class liberals whose contempt for the traditional working class was palpable. The right and the faux-left 'Spiked' crew didn't need to construct a divisive 'woke' identity politics narrative - it was handed to them by the stupid liberalised left. In 2008 the left had no solution to the financial crisis. Even Corbynomics fell significantly short. The traditional left founded on socieconomic concerns shared by the multiethnic working class as a whole despite cultural prejudices and tensions died. National populism thrived in the vacuum - it was too easy for the fake 'far right' and assorted racists to convince an electorally significant number of working-class whites that the liberalised left was at best useless and at worst their mortal enemy. Polanski is doing his best to refocus the left on economic concerns and promote economic literacy without abandoning civil rights. Good luck to him. But the chasm opened by 'progressive neoliberalism' is deep and wide. I hope it isn't too late.

[Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled]

Zelensky's new state hero, Andrii Melnyk, in July 1941: "We collaborate closely with Germany and invest everything in this collaboration...we believe that Adolf Hitler’s new order in Europe is the real order, and that Ukraine is one of the avant-gardes"
https://t.co/ZzIyCWu1ci

[Brian Dunning @BrianDunning]

Trying to have a conversation about glyphosate, and someone falsely brings up the IARC classifying it as a carcinogen? I am here to the rescue, with exactly the ammunition you need to fight back and stand up for science: https://t.co/MKa7CRHkPN

[don phillips @donph]

Must read.

[William Shankly @knilib]

The article linked is excellent and needs to be read more widely.

[William Shankly @knilib]

The article linked is excellent and needs to be read more widely.

[don phillips @donph]

@MarksLarks Question is. How do you practise that? Until you get good at it?

[don phillips @donph]

@kmflett Sort of disagree, but in an amiable way.

[keith flett @kmflett]

Going electric: 60 years (17th May 1966) since Dylan played Manchester Free Trade Hall https://t.co/i9IhjLeY60 via @kmflett

[Tally Sticks @widespreadhaze]

First, “the markets” do not care whether the budget is “in balance” in the abstract. Bond pricing is not a moral referendum on fiscal tidiness. It reflects expected Bank Rate, expected inflation, term premia, liquidity conditions, regulatory demand, pension-fund behaviour, global portfolio preferences, collateral demand, and the expected path of nominal income. A government can run deficits for decades and still have low yields; it can also run a balanced budget and suffer a currency or banking crisis. The relevant question is not “is spending in balance?” but “what is the macroeconomic and institutional setting?”

Second, you import a household-creditor model into a monetary-sovereign state. The UK government does not “borrow money” in the same sense that a firm or household does. It issues sterling liabilities: bank notes, reserves, NS&I savings bonds, Treasury bills, gilts within a sterling monetary system whose unit of account it defines. Gilt issuance is not the state rummaging around for money it lacks; it is a liability-management operation: exchanging one form of state liability for another. The risk on sterling gilts is therefore not ordinary insolvency risk, but interest-rate risk, inflation risk, duration risk, and political/institutional risk.

Third, “creditors will assess whether they will get it back” is misleading in the UK case. Holders of gilts are not concerned that the UK will be technically unable to credit sterling to their accounts at maturity. They are worried about the real value of what they receive, future interest-rate paths, inflation, and whether they can sell the gilt at a reasonable price before maturity. A different argument.

Fourth, the “markets punish imbalance” claim is selective history. The Liz Truss episode was not simply “the deficit was too large”; it was Bank Rate expectations, sterling weakness, and a forced-selling crisis in leveraged LDI pension strategies. It was not an eternal bond-market law saying “Left spending bad” or “Right tax cuts bad”; it was a specific market-structure and credibility shock.

Fifth, the debt interest is also an income flow to the private sector: pension funds, insurers, banks, overseas holders, and households indirectly. It is not money fired into the sun. The distributional question matters: who receives it, and what else could have been done with the fiscal space? But describing it merely as the cost of “past debt” hides the fact that it is also current income for gilt holders and that the gilts etc will be inherited by future generations as a financial asset.

Sixth, your comparison with education and defence needs care. It is a significant fiscal transfer, but your framing is designed to make the state appear like a maxed-out household credit card. A fallacy.

In sum, the bond market is not a Victorian bank manager checking whether the household books are balanced. In a sterling system, gilts etc are state liabilities issued as part of monetary and reserve management. The real constraint is inflation and productive capacity, not whether the spreadsheet performs moral virtue.

[don phillips @donph]

This is so funny

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: Stanford researchers found that overworked AI agents began embracing Marxist views.

[don phillips @donph]

@DiscussingFilm Natasha Lyonne.