- “Will lockdown still end on June 21st?” – According to Katy Balls in the Spectator, it depends on whether vaccine hesitancy remains an issue in Government calculations
- “Full easing is now unlikely” – From what Robert Peston’s heard, the prospect of stage 4 going ahead as planned is “close to nil”
- “Boris Johnson is not to blame for the spread of the Indian variant” – Writing in the Telegraph, Ross Clark defends the Prime Minister against the charge that he has been ignoring obvious scientific evidence about the threat posed by the Indian variant
- “Don’t be fooled by ‘freedom day’ – this totalitarian nightmare is far from over” – “We are,” writes Annabel Fenwick Elliott in the Telegraph, “as so many people continue to wilfully ignore, still living under a totalitarian regime that no-one voted for”
- “Every time we think life might be returning to normal, along comes another Covid variant” – “Each time the Government needs to scare the public into submission, a new mutation pops up,” says Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph. “But we will only be able to test our hard-won vaccine resilience by ending lockdown”
- “Northern Ireland police cleared of bias over Bobby Storey funeral” – The Guardian reports that the PSNI has been cleared of bias in handling the funeral of Bobby Storey which attracted over 2,000 mourners last June, the watchdog finding that they had prioritised security over the enforcement of the Covid regulations which were “confusing”
- “Online betting surge among young people” – Online gambling increased six-fold during the lockdowns, the Times reports, and young men were particularly susceptible
- “YouTube launches vaccination ad campaign” – In conjunction with the NHS, YouTube has launched a multi-million-pound advertising campaign to encourage young people to get vaccinated, the BBC reports
- “Successful Covid vaccine trials give GlaxoSmithKline a lift” – A COVID-19 vaccine jointly developed by GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi has shown positive results in early-stage trials, according to the Times
- “Is the Pfizer vaccine as effective as claimed?” – Norman Fenton and Martin Neil note on the Probability and Law blog that the Israeli study showing Pfizer jabs to be 95% effective is a bit dubious
- “Demonising vaccine “refuseniks” is pointless and wrong” – “An individual’s decision to proceed with an injection should be a matter of informed consent, not something decreed by top-down diktat and laced with veiled threats,” writes Dr Alex Starling in Reaction
- “Fat is a lockdown issue” – “Lockdown was, in part, the sacrifice of liberty to gluttony,” says Dr Sarah Ingham at Conservative Home
- “Kept apart – the price of beating Covid” – Two members of the British Medical Association, the former president Sir Al Aynsley-Green, and representative Dr Latifa Patel, describe their hospital stays and ask whether the balance between safety and compassion is right
- “Friends and allies: The Gates Foundation and British scientists” – In a third instalment of a Conservative Woman series, Karen Harradine shine a light on the connections between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the universities and colleges that employ members of SAGE
- “Delay reopening? We saw that coming” – The Prime Minister’s talk of a possible delay to the end of lockdown is entirely predictable, according to Daniel Miller at Conservative Woman, and “the rationale has no relation whatsoever to any Indian variant”
- “Covid scaremongering – the Government’s £1bn blitz” – Frederick Edward outlines the huge sums of money that have been spent on Covid media campaigns in the Conservative Woman
- “Ministers – not the unvaccinated – are ruining it for everybody else” – Writing for Bournbrook Magazine, Michael Curzon is under no illusion who the real culprits are when it comes to delaying the reopening
- “A Snapshot of the Worldwide Freedom Demo in London” – Emily Garcia reports on Saturday’s anti-lockdown protest in London, part of the second Worldwide Demonstration For Freedom, for LeftLockdownSceptics
- “No shortage of lockdown protests – only a shortage of reporting” – Roger Watson searched far and wide for reports on Saturday’s protest in London, but apart from Toby’s account, there wasn’t too much to find, he says at the Unity New Network
- “Care homes or prisons” – Collateral Global talks to Julia Jones, co-founder of the John’s Campaign, about the cessation of visiting rights in care homes, part of the third edition a mag on elder care
- “The Great Reopening (Indoors)” – Peter Hitchens joins Mike Graham and Kevin O’Sullivan as the Independent Republic of Mike Graham marks the day that the pubs reopened indoors. They are finally in the same room!
- “Sweden, Covid and lockdown – a look at the data” – To some, Sweden is a “Covid hell”, says Fraser Nelson in the Spectator, “but if Covid and lockdown is judged in the round, you can see why Swedes remain confident in Anders Tegnell”
- “Calgary pastor arrested after breaking pandemic gathering rules for months” – Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary has become the latest pastor to be arrested in relation to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, CBC reports
- “Will 2020 Prove to Be the Beginning of the End of Modernity?” – “Abruptly starting 16 months ago, there quite possibly began the end of liberal civilisation,” writes Donald J. Boudreaux for the AIER
- “Texas Reports Zero Covid Deaths two Months After Biden Called its Reopening Plan as Neanderthal Thinking” – Texan “Neanderthal thinking” has worked out quite well Newsweek reports, as on Sunday, just after NCAA FCS college football national championship, Governor Greg Abbott reported that the State had recorded zero Covid deaths in the previous 24 hours
- “School closures on trial” – Writing in Spectator USA, Richard Koenig’s judgement is that “for more than a year now the young have borne the burden when their elders freaked out over Covid”
- “Dr. Fauci is Finally Unmasked” – “The serious unraveling of Fauci’s undeserved reputation as ‘an American hero’ and ‘the most trusted voice on COVID-19’ has finally begun,” says Peter Barry Chowka in the American Thinker
- “Queensland researchers’ discover COVID-19 ‘heat-seeking missile’” – 9 News Australia reports on the development of a treatment for COVID-19, a form of therapy called ‘gene silencing’ in which nano particles are injected into the blood to seek out and destroy coronavirus cells. It’s hoped it will be available in two years
- “What Covid Reveals About our Leaders” – Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying discuss the ‘lab-leak’ hypothesis and the potential of ivermectin to treat Covid in the most recent episode of the DarkHorse Podcast
- “Wake Up From Covid” – A Groundhog Day parody. Very funny. Worth watching
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The Bank of England’s mismanagement?
Yeah right, mismanagement.
They had no idea, no idea whatsoever that announcing categorically no more bond purchases would cause a problem in the market just when Truss was announcing her budget.
Give me a break.
Presumably the Bank of England also allowed Fishy to “mismanage” his way through Lockdown to the tune of five hundred billion pounds principally via the issue of dodgy loans, ‘eat out to help out’ and a ‘sit on your arse getting paid to do FA’ scheme comically named ‘furlough.’
Yeah right.
Why have I got a nagging feeling that the B o E is being run by the WEF? No, surely not.
Mmmmm, up to a point Lord Copper. The big unfunded sum wasn’t the £2bn from the 45% to 40% tax cut but the open ended, 2 year commitment on energy costs. At the time this was being forecast to cost £100bn +. Again, a panic reaction. Sunak has largely benefited from the gas price coming down & a mild autumn.
How can a 2-year commitment be open-ended? And how come the markets did not panic when every rich world government on the planet shut down large portions of their economy and started paying people to do nothing, and the open-ended commitment to buy “vaccines” etc?
You’re right. Why was there an such a variance in response? My point is merely that it shouldn’t be portrayed as a binary choice between ILDs and mini budget. There were a whole lot of other things going on with asymmetric impacts.
Because there’s a point up to which Govt debt raises concern not panic. Take it beyond then you get panic.
“It’s extraordinary that this story hasn’t been covered by Britain’s financial journalists.”
Hardly. It’s entirely to be expected given that most/all of Britain’s mainstream journalists and their bosses, editors, owners, financial or otherwise, are fully bought into the narrative.
With the possibly honourable exception of Liam Halligan
Indeed. The only part where I disagree with the article is where he describes the market size by stating it as ‘The total value of liabilities hedged with LDI strategies was $1.8 trillion in 2021.’.
LDI, as he describes earlier, has absolutely nothing to with hedging, to the contrary. It is a pure interest rate speculation, and one that actually reduces or negates any previous and underlying asset/liability match of a pension fund engaging in it.
The whole BoE board should be fired for allowing LDI to happen and those who sold and practiced it should be prosecuted and made personally liable for its losses.
The central bank failure here also reminds me of PCR’s splendid analysis and assessment of the FED’s sole responsibility for bringing about the Great Depression.
https://www.unz.com/proberts/is-the-federal-reserve-merely-incompetent-or-is-there-a-dark-agenda/
https://www.unz.com/proberts/an-incompetent-federal-reserve-board-caused-the-great-depression-and-the-new-deal-that-gave-congress-power-to-new-executive-branch-regulatory-agencies/
The one time in a century when central banks should really provide credit and liquidity amply and immediately, they deliberately always seem to fail to do so.
We’d better be off without them, as the period and system before they came into existence showed.
Best to give them all the Icahn treatment and to turn their defined benefit pensions to ‘whatever is left in the fund’ ones.
I work in the LDI industry (as in, it’s what I do 80% of my time at work), so like to think I can speak about it with some degree of confidence.
There is nothing wrong in principle with LDI, in my view. Most pension schemes would like to fund their liabilities with secure assets that pay fixed or inflation linked cashflows. Only goverment bonds fit the bill (assuming of course that the government doesn’t default) as no other assets are as secure or provide long dated cashflows (some pension scheme liabilities stretch out by more than 50 years).
The problem is that the return on gilts is too low, and most pension schemes have a funding gap that they need to fill. They do so by borrowing money, collateralised by the gilts that they hold, to invest in higher returning assets, for example equities.
What happened was that the value of gilts fell, which meant that the loans needed to be propped up by more gilts. For some pension funds they were running so short of gilts that they had to start selling them to pay down the loans with cash. This led to a fire selling spiral that eventually ended when the Bank of England stepped in to support the market.
The background to LDI is that the government and regulators have absolutely encouraged pension schemes to adopt this strategy. Largely in good faith, in my view.
For example, all pension schemes need to pay a levy to the Pension Protection Fund each year. How large this is depends on a number of factors, but one is investment risk, and the more of your pension scheme liabilities you hedge the lower your levy is.
I think the Bank of England acted ineptly and arrogantly, but I don’t necessarily feel there was a hidden agenda.
All this is aggravated by regulatory and central bank incompetence and failed interventions. The FSA/FCA are also complicit in the failures.
The next stupidity, scandal and black hole….
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/pensions-retirement/news/gold-plated-public-sector-pensions-cost-taxpayers-150pc/
This is actually the real divide in our societies and the real fight, the private vs the public sector, and what will break Western democracies soon.
It’s even worse in Europe and the US, but the UK seems to be unique in having uncapped automatic indexing on DB public sector pensions.
As it was unique in having sold all its gold at the low and having issued massive amounts of long term inflation linked bonds, instead of issuing long term fixed coupon ones, during a prolonged period of artificially low interest rates.
Lunatics in charge of the asylum at the BoE and the Treasury.
Let’s not forget Carnage Carney had a spell at the B o E. I wonder what mischief he got up to during that gig?
‘“poor financial regulation…’
its always the part of the market that’s still free that’s the problem therefore… MORE REGULATION!
Two years of economic shutdown, the economy awash with valueless money, Truss promising to throw more valueless money onto the inflationary fire and the markets think ‘bad risk’ maybe even default. An energy crisis that Government policy is to make it worse.
The fire was already raging, Truss just threw more fuel on it.
Lowered tax rates are suppose to be accompanied by lower Govt spending otherwise higher spending. Lower tax rates during inflation caused by too much money chasing too few goods just adds more money to the chase.
The Bank of England should have done what exactly? It’s not the Government as the article suggests it must be.
They should have been more aggressive in raising interest rates rather than disappointing the markets with a modest rise.
The misnomer and myth that lower taxes ALWAYS bring in less revenue, perpetrated through all the usual avenues to stir up a storm is / was the chokehold many an authority and expert have used before – though in this case the dystopian elites who want to bring in their new system are showing their colours [by any means necessary it would seem] once again. But the Conservatives (so-called) bend over and take it as if it’s never been their bread and butter?
Naturally Labour (and their cheerleaders) play their predictable part too with all the usual race-to-the-bottom fearporn predictions which many unfortunately fall for, especially during times of uncertainty (though at least it’s opposition in the form we’d expect) but any semblance of bringing us back from the brink is now in full swing I guess.
I’m not an economist but I understand the basics of a genuine free market. Nothing makes sense in any of this posturing of doom and gloom other than it has to be an organised destruction of the system we have – to usher in a system we would never want (if it was genuinely explained and to the uninitiated).
As far as the B of E to play this tactic at a time like this reveals their intent, if indeed bankers were of the sort to be trusted even a morsel for their own benefit and monetary gain (at least with their desire for profit we know where we stood). Now we’ve thrown out the old with the new, the pertinent question is where are they now to get their ill-gotten gains? I guess it’s safe to look to ESGs and CBDCs for where they’re expecting.
“the pertinent question is where are they now to get their ill-gotten gains?:
The poor bloody infantry as usual.
US.
Deleted. Posted in error.
Dead right. Andrew Bailey is a WEF stooge and we know that they don’t want Western countries to have pro-growth policies. They want increased indebtedness because that gives them power via the financial markets.
I tend to the view that the intention is to utterly bankrupt the country and then sort of sell it off or mortgage us to something like the IMF.
I can call my wife in evidence to confirm I suspected the hand of the BoE in Liz Truss’s deownfall from the beginning, She should ask suitable questions in the HoC to force Ministers to confirm (doubtful) or deny and lie about this.
Yes, obvious isn’t it. WEF wanted Sunak. BoE did the dirty work to fake alarmism from MSM. I have to say though that Truss seemed too inept to understand what was happening.
Although all of this it true (the BOE and government in general setting up the rules for the LDI meltdown to happen in certain circumstances) and the moral hazard is disgraceful, it would be wrong to exonerate Truss because of it (and don’t forget that she had already pledged gajillions with an energy price cap). It was her (and Kwast’s) job to KNOW these rules and that her actions might end up triggering the meltdown. If she didn’t know, that is bad. If she DID know and proceeded anyway, that is even worse.
Her ineptitude has meant 0 debate on whether a change to lower taxes and business friendly is a better alternative to more of the same high taxes and control. We all lose because of that.
It was pretty obvious that the Bank of England (no doubt with the support of the Treasury) DELIBERATELY destabilised the Markts/currency.
They carried out a coup ….. in plain sight. And CON MPs let them do it.
Aye – Tobes is way behind on this one. Even Dan Bongino reported on it on 28th September (I don’t normally watch him, was looking for a comment on Nordstream and it was there.) 6 mins in 3 mins long.
https://rumble.com/v1lv248-who-bombed-the-pipeline-ep.-1861-the-dan-bongino-show.html