The Sunday Ishmael: 03/03/2024

 He took his vorpal sword in hand; long time the manxome foe he sought - so rested he by the Tumtum tree, and stood awhile in thought.

Learn Economics 101 with mrs ishmael

Would you prefer a steak and onion pie or a rhubarb pie? It matters not, it is only a metaphor. The pie can be cut into four slices, and sold to four people who can fill their tum tums quite comfortably. If there are six people, each can have a smaller slice. If there are five people and one 

greedy bastard, then four people get a slice each and mr greedy bastard, or King, gets two. Pretty straight forward - so far, so common sense. This is why poor people, existing on half a slice, or no slices at all, hate rich people, because they nicked all the pies. And why rich people need armed guards to stop poor people demanding that their slice of pie is returned. 

But then, after millennia of static pies and societies, humans invented growth. Growing pies meant that there was more pie, although humans being human, mr greedy bastard, or King, would still commandeer more pie and virgins on their bridal night, because of his Divine Right. (which is another made-up idea which we might cover in Learn Religion 101 with mrs ishmael).

To grow your pie, you need more flour, butter, sugar, rhubarb and oven space. But you don't have the cash to buy these things. So you go to mr greedy bastard and sell him the idea that if he lends you some money, you can grow more pies,  sell them and pay him back his loan, with a little bit extra for his trouble, whilst keeping  some profit for yourself. Profit being the difference between what it cost you to make the pie and what you sold it for. Without taking a profit, you wouldn't bother with pie making in the first place. All this requires trust in the future, a nebulous place, inhabited by pie eaters and pie bakers who pay back the greedy bastards, or bankers, their start-up loans, with interest. A lot can go wrong - even if people don't go off rhubarb pie - in which case you can diversify into apple pie; people may not have the money to buy pie at all, because mr greedy bastard, or Government of the Day, has taken all the pie eaters' money in taxes, or the pie baker decides he can make even more profit by saying to greedy bastard banker, fuck this for a game of soldiers, I'm not paying you back and you need to lend me some more money so I can open another pie bakery. 

Moving away from Rhubarb Pie, economic growth refers to an increase in production in an economy, which is generally manifested in a rise in national income and productivity, allowing an increase in individual income, which is spent on buying more goods and services, which stimulates the production of more of these things. A good thing for everyone, dependant upon increasing the quantity or quality of the working age population, the technology, raw materials and capital to fund it all.

As in the pie model, growth is not straight forward nor is it guaranteed. Economists describe four phases: 

• Expansion – employment, income, industrial production, and sales all increase.
• Peak – The economic expansion hits its ceiling. 
• Contraction – The expansion stalls, then decreases. It becomes a recession when a significant decline in economic activity spreads across the economy.
• Trough – What it says. As bad as it gets.

Fortunately, Jeremy Richard Streynsham Cunt, MP for South West Surrey, is our Chancellor of the Exchequer,  having replaced Kwasi Kwarteng, whom nobody believed in, despite gaining his PhD in political history from Cambridge with a thesis on the recoinage crisis of 1695-9. Chancellor Cunt studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Magdalen College Oxford. I do hope he was paying attention and not letting his Presidency of the Oxford University Conservative Association distract him from his studies, because, as you'll have learned from our exposition of the rhubarb pie growth theory, economics is neither plain nor simple.

Truss and Kwarteng's Big Idea was to cut taxes and let the Brits spend their way into growth. That didn't end well. So, although Chancellor Cunt hints that he may lower taxes on Wednesday, when he gets to wave his red box at us,

he won't, really. Britain is in a recession and the next phase of the economic cycle is Trough. 

There isn't much any Chancellor can do about it - one of the levers - the ability to set interest rates- was given away by Gordon Brown to the Bank of England, who are stubbornly not reducing interest rates, because they have a duty to keep inflation under control, and growth, inflation and recession are, as WellDoneGeorge might say, three cheeks of the same arse that he would like to spank. The other lever - cutting taxes, was kind of broken off by Trussonomics. 

Increasing Government spending on make-work projects to get people back to work at a decent wage, so that they can buy more stuff, to stimulate the production of stuff, that would work, if he had any money left over from funding proxy wars - but that's ok, lets print some more - whoops, inflation.

So you see, fucked.

Of course, he has to pretend that first, he knows what he's doing, second, he has any power to influence what's going on, and third, he's not really trying to further fuck things up so as to give Rachel Reeves an even more impossible job when she walks into 11, Downing Street. Reeves, sweet girl, has A levels in Politics, Economics, Mathematics and Further Mathematics, has an MA in  PPE from New College, Oxford and a further  degree, an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics. Probably over-qualified for the job.

Unlike Jeremy Cunt, who squirmed and writhed in the interviewee's chair on the Laura Kuenssberg show this morning, giving us a little bit of this and a little bit of that, all referencing the economic tools that I carefully described above. The British Government has to create trust in the people it has borrowed money from, women have to be freed up from child care to re-enter the work force, taxes will go down, but immigrants will be taxed. He is going to be Prudent. He confirmed that the financial forecasts setting out how much “headroom” he has in order to meet his fiscal rules had “gone against us”. Apparently the Office for Budget Responsibility told Chancellor Hunt on Wednesday that he has only £12.8 billion of headroom, £2 billion less than he'd hoped for. Headroom? Ah, yes - a self-imposed fiscal rule to increase spending or cut taxes, intended to keep public finances under control and maintain the confidence of the market and the public. 

For example, if the government has a rule that the deficit should not exceed 3% of GDP, and the current deficit is projected to be 2%, there is a 1% fiscal headroom. This means the government can potentially increase its deficit by up to 1% of GDP – either by increasing spending or cutting taxes – without breaking its own rule. 

Yes, I know, it's all made up. On Laura's panel, listening to the Chancellor's attempts to sound Plausible and Prudent was Andy Haldane, former Chief Economist at the Bank of England and a member of the Government's Economic Advisory Council. He recommended that the Chancellor take up sprinkling fairy dust and dealing with his mojo deficit. These are serious economic terms, if not theories.

And Laura herself introduced the spectre of Gordon Brown's great clunking claw of doom. Let's remind ourselves of the masterly economist,  Gordon the Ruiner.

 

WHITHER HIS FEVERED BOMBAST, NOW? mr. ishmael 23/6/2010

Where is his fusillade of tractor statistics, his towering intellect, his metronoming Claw of Doom punctuating each flight of bumptious, bullyboy doggerel;  where is his incisive, hot-housed mind, his grasp of detail, his complete mastery, as they call it - the reptiles at skymadeupnewsandfilth - of his brief; where is his Prudence, now;  where is his promised fighting for his party, for the poor and the sick, where is his snotty, raging tumult of I-Know-Bestisms?

Something made Gordon Brown Bad, and not in a good sense.  He was a parliamentarty bully, needlessly bombastic, eternally over-egging his statistical pudding, shouting the odds so much that we called his blowhard despatch box musings tractor-production statistics, mocked his Great Clunking Fist of Doom, his shredded fingernails, his DryWank JawDrop, his infantile snot-eating and his dreadful bullying of subordinates.

Alongside his unattractive idiosyncracies,  his running of the Treasury and then the government was unwholesome.  We do not have Uncle Sam's system of presidential appointments to cabinet posts, most are filled, in the UK,  by elected politicians.  Brown, however, elevated unelected special advisor Balls to a position of huge influence, eventually parachuting him into a safe Labour seat, party-bigwigs-for-the-use-of;  Mrs Balls, too, surprise-surprise, came from nowhere into cabinet, as did the Milibands, the Eagles and wee motormouth Douglas Alexander; by the time of Tony'n'Imelda's departure to GlobaCrook the cabinet was effectively Snotty's  fiefdom, anti-democratic, non-meritocratic.  

Ah well. We'll see what Wednesday's Budget will bring.

If anyone is feeling the economic pinch, can I recommend making your own butter? You can use it to make pastry for your rhubarb pie. It is very easy, although it helps to have one of these:

You will need 600 ml of double cream, which costs £2.30 from Mr. Tesco, although I daresay you can get it cheaper if you have access to other supermarkets. When mr ishmael and I first came to Orkney, there was a high street grocery store, which, at first sight, carried a wide range of goods. But not cream. On enquiry, I was told, "thoo'll git naa cream onna Whensdie. There's naa caull ferrit. Thoo'll be a ferry-louper theesael?" That store no longer exists. Strange. But we  have Mr Tesco now, although his shelves are often empty in the winter when the ferry can't cross - but when they do, you can get cream on a Wednesday.

Tip the cream into your stand mixer or other beating device, and whizz it for around five minutes. It will first thicken then solidify into a yellow lump, swimming in buttermilk. Squeeze all the milk out of your butter, then put it into a sieve and rinse it under the cold tap until the water runs clear, then add salt if you like and shape it, before wrapping it up tight in greaseproof paper. It tastes like the very best butter. You could add herbs or garlic if wanted - parsley and garlic butter melted onto steak would be just the thing. Mr mike would add ground chillies, I'm sure.

It yields 300 grams of butter, with a good quantity of buttermilk, which can be used in the usual way of milk. As a block of butter weighs 250 grams, costs anything from £1.80 upwards, and is not as good, then it is, as they say, a no-brainer.

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The four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre, collected and curated by editor mr verge, is available on Lulu and Amazon.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

It's all rhubarb