Cuts? WHAT cuts? Ignore the BBC and the Left, public spending is HIGHER than under Labour

Daily Mail "The trouble is that it isn’t. Earlier this week, the City bond trading firm Tullett Prebon produced a report that confirmed what some of us have been saying for months. To all intents and purposes, there hasn’t been any overall cut in public expenditure in the two years since the Coalition came to power. ....Meanwhile, our national debt — what we owe as a nation — continues to soar. According to International Monetary Fund projections, it will increase faster over the next two years than any other leading European country apart from Spain. Proportionate to the size of our economy, our debt is one of the two or three highest in the developed world. When the Coalition took over, it stood at a stonking £1,002 billion. By the time of the next election, it will have risen to an unbelievable £1,613 billion. Using figures produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Tullett Prebon report shows that Government expenditure in 2011-12 was still £22.6 billion, or 3.4 per cent, higher than it was in 2008-09 after nearly a decade of bingeing by the Labour government. That’s how far we have got! And while it is true that the deficit has been reduced — from £140 billion in the first year of the Coalition to £120 billion in the second — this has been achieved almost entirely as a result of higher taxes rather than cuts."

Exploding the myth of the feckless, lazy Greeks

New Statesman
"Here is the first myth: This crisis is made in Greece. It is not. It is the inevitable fallout of the global crisis which started in 2008. Are there features in the Greek economy which made it particularly vulnerable? Yes – there is rampant corruption, bad management, systemic problems, a black market. ......The crisis is a financial one. It is not. It is a political crisis and an ideological one. The difficulties of an economy the size of Greece (1.8 percent of eurozone GDP, 0.47 per cent of World GDP according to 2010 IMF figures) should hardly register as a blip on the global radar. The primary reason for the widespread panic is the interconnectedness of the banking sector – the very same systemic weakness which caused the domino effect in 2008 and which the world has collectively failed to address or regulate. The secondary reason is the eurozone’s refusal to allow Greece to proceed with what most commentators have seen as an inevitable default for many months now. Both these factors are down to political decisions, not sound fiscal policy. .....Greeks are protesting because they do not want the bail-out at all (or the foreign intrusion that goes with it). They have already accepted cuts which would be unfathomable in the UK. There is nothing left to cut. The corrupt, the crooks, the wicked, our glorious leaders, have already transferred their wealth to Luxembourg banks. They will not suffer."

The problem with God is He thinks He's Bob Geldof

Telegraph
"Geldof seems to have fallen victim here to Bono syndrome: the delusion that his saintly outreach work among the world's poor and oppressed somehow renders him beyond the realm of ordinary mortals. So, for example, when you or I slave away at our jobs, the time we spend at work is just time. But when Geldof expends his own time it's so valuable it magically transubstantiates into a form of taxation. Give us a break, Bob."

Greek Money-Go-Round

Guido Fawkes
"Today Eurozone governments are sending €4.2 billion to Greece to enable it to repay the European Central Bank €3.3 billion for bonds maturing a week on Friday. They are repaying themselves with their own coin."

The euro as we know it cannot continue, and we can't ignore this terrible reality a moment longer

Daily Mail
"The euro has always been an anti-democratic project. Now, with these elections, the people of two member countries have spoken definitively against the privations being imposed on them to sustain it. This dose of reality is long overdue. With problems in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and even Holland, which is between governments because no one can agree on austerity measures, it is clear it will not be the last. The euro as we know it is now on life support."

Those Revolting Europeans

NYT
"Consider the case of Ireland, which has been a good soldier in this crisis, imposing ever-harsher austerity in an attempt to win back the favor of the bond markets. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, this should work. In fact, the will to believe is so strong that members of Europe’s policy elite keep proclaiming that Irish austerity has indeed worked, that the Irish economy has begun to recover. But it hasn’t. And although you’d never know it from much of the press coverage, Irish borrowing costs remain much higher than those of Spain or Italy, let alone Germany. So what are the alternatives? One answer — an answer that makes more sense than almost anyone in Europe is willing to admit — would be to break up the euro, Europe’s common currency. Europe wouldn’t be in this fix if Greece still had its drachma, Spain its peseta, Ireland its punt, and so on, because Greece and Spain would have what they now lack: a quick way to restore cost-competitiveness and boost exports, namely devaluation."

Britain is shackled to the corpse of Europe

Daily Mail "Europe's economic problems are about to get a whole lot worse. For the past three years, governments have tried, however ineffectually, to tackle the debt crisis. Now, though, in country after country, voters are demanding precisely the high-tax and high-spend policies which caused the recession in the first place. Yesterday’s elections in France and Greece were the first of what will surely be many advances by the populist Left. In both places, candidates were elbowing each other aside during the campaign to demand more intervention and an end to cuts. The new French President is an unapologetic Socialist of the kind we haven’t known in this country since Michael Foot. François Hollande wants wealth taxes, stimulus spending and a massive expansion of the state payroll."

Au revoir, Sarkozy! Au revoir, austerity! New Euro crisis as French and Greeks reject cuts and vote for return to ruinous spending

Daily Mail
#Euro at three-month low as Nicolas Sarkozy is ousted by Francois Hollande
#Markets tumble as uncertainty grows over country's new Socialist agenda
#Hollande expected to push against German-led European austerity drive
#Exodus of 'le super-rich' to London expected in light of planned 75% tax rate
#Meanwhile in Greece, voters reject policies of tough financial discipline
#Greek stocks plummet 7.6% as country faces weeks of uncertainty
#Analysts warns results could tip single currency into collapse within months

Judges show we CAN put a block on online porn as they order internet providers to block illegal file sharing site

Daily Mail "The High Court ruled that Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, which enables users to download files, music and films without paying, must be blocked by UK-based internet service providers. Companies such as Sky, Talk Talk and Virgin Media have been told to prevent their users from accessing the site, The Pirate Bay, which hosts links to mostly-pirated free music and video. Last night MPs contrasted the vigorous action to force internet service providers (ISPs) to block material which infringes copyright with the lack of movement on blocking children's access to online porn."

QE quadruples FTSE 350 pensions deficit in one year

Telegraph "Pension deficits at the country's biggest companies have quadrupled in 12 months in the wake of the Government's quantitative easing policy."

The unwitting move towards a global gold standard

FT "Professor Lew Spellman, from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, has an interesting new post out on the changing role of gold in the global economy. It relates to the notion that a shortage of safe assets may be driving an epic hunt for “safe collateral” — driving down yields on traditional fixed-income investments — because there are more debt liabilities/obligations than safe collateral in the system. In a zero-yielding environment like this, he believes gold begins to look remarkably attractive. This is especially the case if gold remains a liquid store of value, which is widely accepted as collateral across the system. What’s more, there’s little to differentiate it from a zero-yielding Treasury bond. In fact, the Treasury bond eventually expires, while gold doesn’t. ....." (H/T Guido Fawkes)

Immigration boom under Labour changed face of Britain faster than any major country except Italy, Oxford experts reveal

Daily Mail "The immigration boom under Labour led to the face of Britain changing faster than any major nation except Italy, a study by an Oxford University think tank revealed. During the five-year peak of the influx, the UK’s migrant population soared by 22 per cent – double the average of G8 countries, figures from the Migration Observatory show. Over the past two decades, Britain’s foreign-born population has increased from 3.8million – or 7 per cent of the total population - in 1993 to almost 7million, or 12 per cent per cent in 2010."