Daily Brief

Where are billions in taxpayer dollars intended for the financial services bailout actually going? A new report says we shouldn't be looking at the Treasury Department for answers.

The report comes from a five-member, bipartisan, congressional oversight panel tasked with keeping tabs on the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The panel knocked Treasury for its apparent inability to track TARP dollars, and it criticized the department's handling of the nation's housing foreclosure crisis. None of the TARP funds have been used to help troubled mortgage holders.

"Treasury needs to be clear as to what, if anything, it has done,...

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Can we really guide the economy?

Ryan Avent says that he thinks the "plausible range of economic outcomes is, at the moment, quite wide indeed", and wonders whether "the size of this conceivable range is actually reflective of potential outcomes, rather than simple ignorance":

If it seems like things could go really well or really poorly, is it because outcomes are very dependent on our actions or because we have no idea what's going on? And I suppose that if you want to understand the different approaches to policy advocated by liberals relative to libertarians, that question, and its answer, is key.

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The horrors of cheap food

It always puzzles me when people say things like this:

Even now only one pound in ten spent by a British household spends goes on food and drink. In 1970 we spent twice as much. In 1955 about a third of British household income went on food.

Well, OK, it's not the bald statement of those facts which puzzles me. It's well known that we have an heirarchy of wants. Water first, food, sleep, sex, shelter, clothing and so on. Once one desire is satiated (even partly) we move on to the next. What people rather miss though is...

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Sir Norman's right

Well, Sir Norman Rosenthal is right in a way.

"I believe history is history and that you can't turn the clock back or make things good again through art. Ever since the beginning of recorded history, because of its value, art has been looted and as a result, arbitrarily distributed and disseminated throughout the world."
He went on: "Of course, what happened in the Nazi period was unspeakable in its awfulness. I lost many relatives whom I never knew personally, and who died in concentration camps in the most horrible of circumstances. But I believe grandchildren or distant...

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How low can we go?

Fraser's already raised the most important question hovering over today's rate cut: that is, what options are left once the rate-cutting route has been exhausted?  But there's another question in the air, touched on by Mike Smithson over at Political Betting: just how low can we go?  We're already at the lowest base rate in the Bank of England's 315 year history, and bookies are offering odds on rates hitting 0 percent by the end of the year (20/1 according to the Ladbrokes press release that hit my inbox earlier).

Politically, I...

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