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King Charles went into hospital with a prostate issue. It was meant to be kept private but there must have been a leak.

There's a story here about how AI is going to be used to prevent 3 busses turning up at once, as compared to the old method where the union prevents any busses from turning up whatsoever. I also saw a story about an electric bus catching fire in London which is probably the only time anyone's seen a London bus with the heating on it winter

Another week and some more Jeffrey E ......

A huge amount of bloodshed in Israel after an attack by Hamas led to brutal retaliation. Let's see how things unfold over the next week but like many around the world, I'm shaking my head and thinking about the tragic rise in petrol prices we're likely to see if it turns into a broader war in the region

Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac is apparently going to get her own Barbie doll. I'm guessing she must be hard up for cash if she's only just gotten around to being able to afford one.

The government is looking to pass a law that will lead to the eventual ban on cigarette sales. The announcement met largely with apathy, although it will win lots of votes from people who are involved in the UK's tobacco smuggling industry, which is valued at £6bn per year. As someone who regularly flies between the UK and America, remember to drop your preferred brand in the comments and I'll see what I can do.

Here's a classic update of a joke. A Scotsman walks into a bar, alone, because the Englishman, Welshman and Irishman are still at the world cup. A 36-14 loss yesterday, see you in 4 years I guess.

A man was arrested after trying to kidnap and murder TV presenter Holly Willoughby. Authorities have put out a press statement reminding would-be criminals that James Corden is currently in England

And finally the HS2 project was back in the news with presenters trying desperately to not describe it as a train crash. It's almost certain that it will never reach Manchester and the SNP realise the game is up and it's too expensive to expand it to Glasgow. A government spokesperson was heard broadcasting in "Euston we have a problem"

It's back to school, I'm back from holiday and it seems that even the school supplies shopping couldn't stop Wilko from going bust - they had with a balance sheet weaker than a LibDem handshake

The Edinburgh festival had some controversy this year but it also had some great jokes, like the one where Nicola Sturgeon talked about her new book and how her choosing to resign had nothing to be with her being arrested.

Vladimir Putin sacked one of his senior army officials and then a few days later Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a tragic air accident. Or you could also say that Vladimir fired one and flambéed the other.

There was the conclusion of Lucy Letby's ghastly court case and my conclusion was that the woman should have been strangled at birth. A friend told me a joke where Lucy gets cast into a desolate pit, filled with crying screaming people and a demon tells her "welcome to hell" and she replies, "thank goodness, I thought I'd been reinstated in an NHS hospital"

There was the Womens' World Cup, where they girls failed to win, proving conclusively that they're just as bad as the mens' team. Personally, I didn't actually realise the game was happening, in part because I'm Scottish but mostly because I don't watch the BBC

Mohamed Al-Fayed died, almost 26 years to the day after Princess Diana, Diana's name was famously an acronym for Died In A Nasty Accident, she'll be forever in our hears, windscreens and french roads

Michael Parkinson also died, although at least his family can now claim that over-50s life cover he spent the last couple decades banging on about. I'd quite like to imagine the scene where he goes through the pearly gates, meets up with Rod Hull and swings a punchy now that it's just the 2 of them.

A child at my kid's school self-identifies as a donkey, their initials are He and Haw

This week I thought we'd talk about the world of American companies dicovering that going woke makes you go broke. It was recently the 4th of July and for several decades the most popular beer in the US was Budweiser, until this year when it didn't even make the top 10. This is all due to that Dylan Mulvaney nonsense where they rebranded the blue collar beer to specifically appeal to men who are also keen to advertise their love for transvesticism. The irony really is that they could have appealed to both sets of people if they'd used an old pic of Eric Idle dressed up and stuck some Monty Python quotes on the tins. Nonetheless this stuff is all the rage right now and despite the company losing tens of billions of dollars in less than 6 months, this month also saw Unilever let the Ben & Jerry brand announce that Mount Rushmore was a disgrace and that huge swathes of the mid west should be handed over to native tribes, which I guess is easy seeing as how none of that tribal land is located in upstate Vermont (where Ben & Jerry live) or Palo Alto. It has the intellectual integrity of me deciding to boycott nicoise salad or refuse to purchase ladies shoes.

More recently Natwest decided to cash in on both The Ashes as well as diversity by putting up a billboard saying "Cricket has no boundaries" It literally has boundaries. That's how you score points! More scarily, there was the issue that Coutts bank is a subsidiary of Natwest and Nigel Farage had his bank account closed. The bank put out a press statement claiming he didn't have enough money in it although this turned out to be a complete fabrication after a dossier was leaked, revealing that they just didn't like his anti-EU politics. This is one of these stories where you really have to argue it by asking what if it was someone else, if Jeremy Corbyn for instance had his electricity cut off all winter because none of the energy companies wanted to have him listed as a customer due to his views on renationalising the grid.

Other examples in recent years have been Gillette dropping their tagline "The Best a Man Can Get" before the accountants realised that most of their customers had a y-chromosome, or perhaps the removal of the Uncle Ben's Rice branding, which I still think was over an argument with the writers of Spiderman: Uncle Ben being a major character in that story, and not actually asian the last time I checked. One of the leading causes of the recent Titanic accident was the decision by the company to get rid of former royal navy staff-members because they were all white blokes in their 50s with far too much knowledge about submarine safety and nowhere near enough knowledge of useful things like the plight of North African migrants.

And yet despite this woke smokescreen, a woke-screen, the attitude is entirely duplicitous. Disney might be putting out films with homosexual characters but they re-film and reedit scenes when the films are sold to anywhere outside of the US or Europe. The Apple CEO Tim Cook will go on record about the appalling attitude to LGBT people in China, but he'll also manufacture more than 95% of Apple products there whilst occasionally putting out some rainbow themed social media posts. At a national level the US is even worse, pushing one set of morals domestically and another overseas. A good case in point could be Joe Biden who has gone on from playing that Banjo player in Deliverance to being President. A few years ago he said that the US had to reduce its carbon footprint and went on record saying that Saudi Arabia would "pay the price" for its poor human rights record before begging them to increase oil production. Of course, in reality they sided with Russia, cut production, bumped prices and and Biden voted to "impose consequences" before China brokered a deal, involving Iran as well as numerous human rights abuses. More recently the Saudis bought out the PGA golf tour, leaving those on the left to wonder whether they preferred traditional golf tournaments organised by Donald Trump or those organised by a country where putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car is literally punishable by execution. The situation is so beyond parody at this stage that I'm genuinely waiting to see the Saudi's use of crucification being spun as an olive branch to Christians and a demonstration of the kingdom's religious tolerance and modernisation. Certainly that would be far less ridiculous than say Disney releasing Mary Poppins where the nanny is white and therefore evil, or whatever nonsense the house of mouse next has planned. Currently there is a version of Snow White being made where the character named after her skin as white as snow is played by a Colombian and the 7 Dwarves look like a pride rally in New York and are regular size, apparently because Peter Dinklage didn't understand that the dwarves in the story were the magical species from German folklore and not people afflicted by dwarfism. Who would have thought that Pinnochio telling lies would turn out to be more honest than the corporation itself.

Sir Michael Caine turned 90 and 'not a lot of people knoww that
I received an email asking me to spell "maps" backwards but it turned out to be spam

The big story this week though was the collapse of the US financial firm Silicon Valley Bank, which in turn has set of a chain of donimos around the world that threaten to destroy the lifestyles of some executives who'd hoped to retire in their 50s but whose share certificates may now as well have pictures of that Dogecoin dog on it. They could barely run a bath, let alone a business, I've seen candidates on the Apprentice make a better job at selling food down the market.

There have since been a series of accusations about what specifically went wrong, most of which center on the fact that the management was obsessed with diversity rather than competance, to the extent that the board of directors only had one member with previous banking experience. For those of you with a goode technical understanding of the markets, the entire business was geared around using short term lending facilities to cover long term investments and when rates went up, everything fell apart because the operation was backed by 10 year treasury bills paying less than 2%.

Who was running things then? Mostly people who'd make political donations to the democrats which is why President Biden has since stepped in and guarenteed everyone's money, not just the first $250k that the Federal Reserve would normally cover. In this case, a $250k limit would only be enough to cover 3% of the deposit capital, such is their customer base. Make no mistake, this is one of the largest transfers of wealth from poor people to wealthy people in US history, up there with the time that George Lucas convinced everyone to pay $10/time to watch Jar Jar Binks costar in not one but 3 terrible movies. Harry and Meghan have all their money parked there at SVB and they will be bailed out by working class people in a way that even King Charles would find a bit unseemly

The UK assets of the bank? Well those were picked up by HSBC for the nominal cost of £1. I believe that figure came about because it's all the banks treasurer had on him after he'd already handed over a twenty pound note at Starbucks on the way to the meeting. But it is a reminder that the contageon from this is global and there were other banks making the same terrible financial decisions. One of those is Credit Suisse which is large enough that its collapse could do the unthinkable and destroy the Swiss banking system. And I find that a terrfying prospect though largely because I'm a huge fan of that swiss chocolate money you get at Christmas time.

Some fossil fuel protesters decided to throw tomato soup onto Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' at the National Gallery. I can only imagine that they expect the gallery to replace all the oil paintings with watercolours and that in Heinz-sight the gallery regrets letting them in

Robbie Coltrane passed away this week at the age of 72. I’ve not got a joke about that but I hear that Frank Carson does and it’s a cracker.

John Cleese is going to be hosting a program on GB News, focusing on things like cancel culture and the like. As John would presumably be the first to say, “Don’t mention the culture war!”

Prince Andrew is apparently going to be looking after the Queen’s corgis, although that makes sense given he has a lot of experience in grooming. If you’re wanting to rewatch the queen’s funeral btw, the BBC are showing the highlights on Maj of the day.

And all change at Number 10 or should I say number 11 after the Chancellor was sacked in favour of Jeremy Hunt. I knew someone once who was sacked 5 weeks into a job after a bunch of money went missing, Kwasi should just be glad he doesn’t have the police knocking on his door. So with Hunt in the job, I guess it will be a few months of boring nothingness as far as government goes. The BBC seem to think there’s going to be an election but why would the government possibly call one? It’s 50-50 whether there would even be a change of party Leadership, it’s not like there’s a unity candidate waiting in the wings. As for Kwasi though, a lot of it was his own fault, he did himself out of a job really, you don’t need a chancellor if there’s no money left to manage.

And in some personal news, I met Diane Warwick in the street and I asked for an interview but she walked on by.

It’s been quite a busy week or two for Liz Truss as she settles into the new job, new email account, testing out the coffee machine and discovering that HR is not in fact Human Resources, but High Risk, a department at the Bank of England. Interest rates are going to be going up which makes a change from the past few years where we actually saw zero-interest loans. Those are the ones named as such because people have zero interest in paying back the money, typically used to purchase buy-to-let properties or to set up an energy company that subsequently goes into receivership.

The cost of energy has stabilised to be fair, although it’s still cheaper to get burgled than to leave the lights on when you go out and if you want to keep your bills down, I’d suggest buying a paperweight to hold them in place. That’s about all the suggestions anyone has, other than maybe turn everything off and work from the office during the week, rather than the living room, or the veranda, or the local pub. I hear some people have been doing that, obviously not me though, in case anyone from work is listening.

If you look in the dictionary, a ‘truss’ is supposed to support things, not collapse them, so what is Liz Truss’ game plan with the economy? Rishi Sunak is busy re-evaluating that US Green Card he has and so the new Chancellor is Kwasi Kwarteng, who is certainly making good on a promise to eliminate stamp duty, mostly by eliminating the concept of buying a house any time soon. The current plan is a huge gamble on growth. Reduce taxes, blow up the deficit and hope that growth manages to pay for it, although with companies looking to escape the energy crisis in Europe, there’s a strong argument to be made for that policy. JP Morgan has recently looked at evacuating its Hamburg operations this winter and relocating trading to London, if the lights go out and Germany descends into a 3 day week. Numerous American companies have talked about expanding in the UK, especially now that those managers on a US salary would suddenly be getting paid 10% more thanks to recent moves on the currency market.

In many respects this is a little like the early 90s where a series of shock financial moves ultimately lead to a booming economy 3 or 4 years later. This assumes of course that the government can survive; In 1997, Tony Blair managed to swoop in at the last minute and claim that economic prize as his own although Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair. A competent opposition leader would be all over the news and seen by the public as a prime minister in waiting, but most people on the street would struggle to recognise him and what few interviews he has done have been lacking at best. He recently gave a fairly bad one where to test how on-pulse he was with working class people he was asked about the World Cup next month and wasn’t able to name a single England striker. Although to be fair that’s only one fewer than Gareth Southgate

I’ve been away on holiday the past couple weeks so what did we missed?

- There’s a cost of living crisis is all over the news with many commentators saying that this winter will see people choose between eating or heating although I guess it means we’re either going to solve the obesity crisis or the pensions crisis. Next on the addenda is supposedly a 3 day week and talk about it being like the 1970s which is frankly a load of cobblers because at least there was decent music back then and Channel 5 hadn’t been invented
- There’s a water shortage so it must be a worrying time if you’re an East End gangster who dumped a body in a reservoir. I guess they could try to recover the body first but just to rub salt into the wound, a tank of petrol to visit the reservoir at midnight probably costs a pony or a dragon or however that system works. It always surprised me Brussels never tried to enforce the metric system on cockneys, like £20 was a Alsatian £100 was a Poodle
- Elsewhere in Europe things are just as bad: Spain is apparently facing an ice cube shortage. Why, did they forget the recipe?
- There’s a series of rail strikes ongoing although if you think things are bad in Britain, you should take a look at Ukraine and see the damage that a Russian train strike looks like.
- The conservative leadership is still going on, I think the last I read Liz Truss is expected to win by a landslide because Rishi Sunak’s main promises are to try to stop the inflation caused by Rishi Sunak and lower the taxes that were raised by Rishi Sunak.
- Talking about conservative leaders, there’s rumours that Boris Johnson might pay a surprise visit to the UK next week
- Salman Rushdie was stabbed at a speaking event in New York, due to the Satanic Verses novel he wrote more than 34 years ago. Talk about getting it in the neck.
- I hear that Norway has painted barcodes onto all their war ships, so that when they return to port they can Scandinavian
- Cineworld is preparing to go bankrupt, although to be fair I was thinking about doing the same thing after I bought recently 2 tickets and a large popcorn there.
- The producers of The Crown are apparently looking to cast the next series and of course this is Netflix and so producers are keen to see Prince William played by either Wesley Snipes, Idris Elba or possibly Danny Glover
- Swimmer Tom Daley said that homopobia in the third world is a direct result of the British Empire. Which is surprising, I never knew that we ever owned places like Mauritania or Uzbekistan. I’m sure if he pays a trip to famously woke Saudi Arabia they’ll happily let him dive into a swimming pool, albeit only an empty one. I once saw an Amnesty International advert with a black & white photograph of two criminals playing chess between jail cells although it failed to mention how the choice of games is quite limited, it’s not like you can play rock paper scissors, when all any of the shoplifters can play is rock. It’s a brutally rigged justice system that is somehow less fair than that premium rate voting system ITV tried a few years go
- And I saw an interview where Lady Gaga claims she wore a bullet proof vest when she sang at Joe Biden’s inauguration. I’m guessing that was in case there were any music lovers in the audience

MP Neil Parish has been forced to resign after being caught looking at looking at adult websites. Allegedly the clip featured a blonde watching on as a man of Indian descent screwed the taxpayer. Anyway, like I said he’s now stood down, presumably after being stood up the other night, on the internet, whilst the rest of the back-benches make do with smutty remarks about Angela Rayner

Tennis legend Boris Becker was declared bankrupt about 5 years ago but just this last week he was convicted and jailed after it turned out he’d hidden millions away in a secret bank account. Anyway, when he went to the court (legal, not tennis) He was served (geddit?) 2 and half years and when he asked a female lawyer how many months that was she said it’s about 30-love. That’s enough tennis puns…

And of course the war in Ukraine continues. The West has largely stayed out although there’s always that temptation to get involved to distract from domestic issues. In a 100% related note, the Russia has said that the EU and the US are the true aggressors and the Americans have said all that they want is peace and they’ve fight to prevent a war.

I guess the other main story of the week was Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for $44bn which is crazy because I got it for free on the Apple store. The left have of course gone nuts at the thought of the social media platform not continuing to regulate what people can talk about but the company of course long ago lost the right to police the conversation. People were banned from suggesting that Covid originated in a Chinese laboratory, although that has since turned out to be the accepted origin story. The New York Post was banned for reporting the story about the Hunter Biden laptop, calling it Russian propaganda, although it later turned out to be 100% true, much as the likes of the New York Times has since tried to bury the story. Twitter is not fit for purpose as things stand, even accommodating for free speech being a tricky concept, made moreso by being tied up in context and potential misunderstandings. Here’s a good example, the phrase, “We will rock you” - that’s an inspiring lyric when sung by Freddie Mercury but a terrifying proposition when it’s being handed down by a Saudi Judge as a sentence.

In the news this week:
The Queen spent a night in hospital, Meghan Markle’s thoughts and prayers went out to herself.

There’s the Alec Baldwin story I initially saw the headline and assumed that hollywood were finally making another sequel in the Lethal Weapon franchise. Then I read what actually happened, and personally I think Baldwin is a bit old to be playing Oscar Pistorious, but maybe it’s was a biopic about Phil Spector.

There was also the death of Colin Power, who’s death was a huge cause of the spread of misinformation that might end up killing people. So at least he died doing something that he enjoyed.

But for me the larger story this week is something I touched on a few weeks back which is slow and deliberate sabotaging of the economy and society by governments and companies choosing to lay off thousands of critical staff, even when they’re struggling to remain functional as is. But hey, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

One example is the city of Chicago, which is going down the route of preparing to lay off as many police officers as it takes in order to force compliance with stringent new proof-of-vaccine laws. This is after the union encouraged its members not to comply with publicly sharing their medical details - quite the standoff. The city is already an active warzone with close to 700 murders so far this year, close to 2000 sexual assaults and several thousand non-fatal shootings. And yet Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s response is to lay off roughly 3000 police officers and prepare to blame everyone for when things fall apart. If this sounds familiar it’s probably because it’s vaguely like the plot in Robocop although the situation is so farcical you half expect the cast of Police Academy to show up. When it comes to poor decision making, the only way things could get worse would be if the gangs decided to take a lesson from history and construct a large wooden outside city hall one night and see if they let it in the front door. But if we’re talking about horses then let’s talk about bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, the city is now desperately asking neighbouring counties to lend members of staff, none of whom are apparently very keen to help out in what is a political situation, one that could easily be corrected by just changing their mind about laying off half the force.

If those people are after a job though, well elsewhere in California, you can now get a 6 figure salary and a $15k sign-on bonus if you want to be a lorry driver, although unlike the UK Yorkie Bars are not as readily available to truckers in the Golden State. Hang on, a shortage of truck drivers? I still find it strange that many people online seem to be obsessed over the idea that the driver shortage in the haulage is solely an issue in the UK and related to Brexit. America didn’t vote to leave Europe, at least not since the 18th century.

There are 3 pieces to California’s woes. Covid is of course a contributing factor, whether it be a lack of hiring and training, or companies actively laying off staff who don’t wat to get vaccinated. On top of this though is green legislation which bans any trucks made prior to 2011. Never mind that toungue twister about “red lorry yellow lorry” because thanks to Governor Newsom the only ones allowed are green lorries. On top of this, yet another piece of the puzzle is another law called AB5 which prohibits Owner Operators. This is the law that they passed to force Uber to employ workers in the gig economy and force them to pay tax on their earnings, but it’s also now encouraging truckers to go find tax-efficient work elsewhere in any of the other 49 states. That’s the thing about that line of work, it’s pretty easy to move house when everyone you know (including yourself) happens to be a man with a van.

With all the talk of chaos at the pumps I recently went to my petrol station and discovered that the air pump for your tyres, now cost money. I asked the guy at the till and he said “that’s “inflation” for you”

Unfortunately inflation in the economic sense of the word is not a joke though and much like the disgraced former governor of New York has been creeping up on people for some time. This has mostly been hidden by the fact that people aren't buying as many train tickets or going out or the like as they used to so their credit card bills are quite a bit lower than they would have been. Nonetheless food and energy prices have been rising fairly quickly and it’s somewhat scary when you look at how quickly the price of meat is going up by. My kid has a book that says that cows go moo and chickens go cheap, but they certainly aren't going very cheap at my local supermarket.

There’s an expression that fish can’t see water, and unfortunately that’s where the public seem to be when it comes to price rises, unless they’re big ticket items like a car or a new phone. With the latter of those, I guess that Apple is truly one of the most futuristic companies out there in so much as the prices have already taken the next 10 years worth of inflation into account. Either way when interest rates are eventually forced to rise the situation could very quickly (and dangerously) turn critical with inflation jumping into at least double digits and cash savings destroyed in the space of 2 or 3 years. I have most of my money tied up in stocks shares, because it’s nice to have some company.

The current situation has arisen for 2 reasons

1. The boring explanation. Specifically 18 months of the public staying at home not spending money has led to a glut of pent up spending, all of which is happening at a time when supply issues have led to already increased prices and a demand for higher pay, thus causing an inflationary spiral upwards.
2. The more conspiratorial one. That governments around the world are up to their eyeballs in debt and desperate to spin the economy up so that the inflated money supply overtakes the debt burden. If they can keep things under control then they’ll slowly hammer the debt ratio downwards, just like they did after the war.

Where your opinion lies largely comes down to whether you think the world is run by scheming Machiavellian puppet-master geniuses who are 3 steps ahead of everyone. Or perhaps it’s just a random mess, nobody’s in control of anything but we do have some lazy and rather negligent people happy to claim credit for their part a socioeconomic system that nobody properly understands. Who would you like in charge, the New World Order or literally nobody. I don’t know which of those is scarier really.
Here’s a joke to close. How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a light bulb?
The real question is that who broke the light bulb and why are they keeping us in the dark?

Shock as the Canadian Prime Minister was re-elected. It’s Tru(deau)
In America, there was farce after the police arrested someone at the J6 cally for having a bunch of hidden firearms on him, but police admitted that they’d made a mistake and forgotten that he was carrying guns because he was actually an undercover federal officer. Proving once and for all that you can’t make this stuff.
In personal news I’ve started writing a book about the things I should be doing, it’s my ough-to-biography

But the big story this week has been the shortages at the petrol pump as well as other section of the food supply chain, which has been blamed on Brexit, largely because they can’t blame President Trump for things these days so that’s their fallback position for everything, like someone ordering sweet and sour chicken because they can’t be bothered to read the menu, or facts in this case. Does your car need a new clutch? blame Brexit. You can’t remember where you put misplaced your phone? Brexit. Your boiler needs fixed? Blame Brexit. Actually, that last one is actually partially true because it was Theresa May who signed everyone up to eradicate gas heaters by 2050 along with petrol-driven cars and pretty much everything else that’s been invented since the day that James Watt decided he didn’t fancy walking all the way from Stockton to Darlington

There are two problems at hand with regards to today’s shortages. The first of these is a shortage of lorry drivers. That has got nothing to do with Brexit and is a truly global problem right now, Europe is similarly crippled by supply chain issues and in America right now there’s a shortage of school buses which may one day be turned into a tv-movie starring Minnie Driver as a Bus driver. Who would have thought that paying people generous stay-at-home pandemic payments might mean they don’t want to go back to working a low-wage job ever again. What's the difference between a bench and the minimum wage? A bench can support a family. There is no shortage of drivers but there certainly is a global shortage of people willing to go back to working long hours and be paid next to nothing for doing so. Perhaps George Osbourne could help out by adding Lorry Driver to his long list of jobs

The second part of the shortages though is entirely British-made. There is a shortage of industrial CO2 because almost all of it is made at at 2 fertilizer plants that were recently forced to close due to the government’s decision to make natural gas expensive and close industry with zero regards to the knock-on consequences. When I say the government’s decision I mean governments, plural, because everyone for the last 20 years has signed up to close down power stations and move all the factories to China. All so that the carbon emissions happen in someone else’s country and they can claim they’ve met their completely arbitrary target for the UK. If you move an iron foundry from Britain to China global carbon emissions do not go down one iota. I’m left uncertain who is stupider, people queueing up at a petrol station in a Tesla , or the left wing people invited onto the news to claim that a queue of 50 cars outside a BP garage is what Nigel Farage meant hen he promised to put an end to freedom of movement. Life is all about context though, take the expression, “Jesus loves you” - Great to here at a church service, no such a good thing to hear if you’re in a Mexican prison.

​​Exciting times in the world of sport this week after 3 days saw the rise and sudden collapse of a proposed European football super-league. If only Roman Abramovich had been in charge of the Brexit negations then we could have been out 48 hours after the referendum result. The week started with the announcement that 12 elite football clubs were going be starting up a new league which would play games midweek, as a compliment to the existing Saturday games. Depending who you spoke to this included 5 top ranked Premiere League clubs plus Tottenham. Or 5 top clubs, plus Arsenal. You get the idea. There were also some Spanish and Italian teams but nobody from France and apparently Bayern Munich were apparently all for it until they discovered that it said European Super League and not Super-race, so no German teams either. Anyway, fans didn’t like the idea, stating that Tottenham should spending money rebuilding a new squad, not constructing a 2nd trophy cabinet to collect dust and I’d certainly not seen a gunner that angry since the bloke up in that Las Vegas hotel a few years back. Anyway, by Wednesday the teams were dropping faster than political dissidents in Russia and the project swiftly collapsed, queue yet more sporting metaphors. The public are now being dangled the prospect that it could be revived with the Premiere league being reimagined as a UK-wide event with Rangers and Celtic being invited along. That’s a project that for the past 30 years plus has been primarily reserved for being discussed in the pub by the bloke at the end of the bar. The only real upside to that plan really would be that the English fans could finally benefit from the free weekly education on Irish history, King William, and the Pope. Liverpool still sting that song by Gerry & The Pacemakers but Celtic’s discography goes back 3 centuries.
​​
​​Elsewhere in America there was news as Joe Biden announced that the US is going to cut carbon emissions by a half by 2030, describing it as a ‘Once in a century opportunity’ in so much as the taxpayers will be on the hook on it for the next hundred years. Cutting emissions in half is a bit like you or I saying we’re going to drop 2 stone by the end of the year. Very easily to say but utterly ludicrous without a major change in policy, none of which has been given in any proper scrutiny. Going back to the football story, it’s like a bottom-rung club hiring a new manger who claims that he’ll win the Champions League next season without explaining how, all whilst the fans sit around nodding. If we give President Biden the benefit of the doubt and somehow pretend that the money isn’t going to be an issue, where are the cuts actually going to come from? Banning air conditioning in the south? Perhaps banning the sale of new heating systems in Michigan where the winters are 20° below? These are all actually ideas being seriously proposed, generally by the same people that claim that mathematics should be banned from schools - that’s a real thing, look it up. In context, the city of Houston alone has a GDP larger than the UAE and it’s similarly reliant on oil for that money, which the President is wanting to turn off in the way that you or I would turn off if we saw that Ant & Dec were coming on after the break. Forget about healthcare or guns, the environmental movement is far more likely to cause the US to break up, because why on earth would midwestern states commit economic suicide when they can just say no happily go on trading with Asia. In the meantime. Part of the proposals being discussed see China promising peak carbon by 2030 which by definition means that it is actively promising to increase its carbon emissions every single year until the end of the decade. Or worse, perhaps their plan is to continue beyond that but offset it by eliminating those from Tibet and Taiwan. Perhaps Joe’s plan is to half the US emissions by encouraging all the Trump-voting states to leave the country. That would be 25 states, 50% exactly.

Billy Joel once sang a song that mentioned ‘trouble in the Suez’ and right now that would be topical because the Suez Canal currently resembles another major transit route: specifically the M25 on a bank holiday Friday (albeit in a year when there’s not a pandemic: the roads are actually pretty good right now actually even if there’s nowhere to actually drive to)

But this week a container vessel named the Ever Given collided with the side of the canal and managed to get stuck sideways. If you can imagine Diane Abbot trying to shuffle sideways down the aisle of an passenger plane, it looks kinda like that really. Unfortunately, whilst that would be hilarious, this situation in Egypt is not and the shipping route being closed is costing the global economy about $10bn per day in lost trade as boats queue up at both entrances to the canal. The situation is also a lot worse because experts say it may potentially take a couple of weeks to get it sorted and with those sorts of timescales I’m assuming they have a team of broadband engineers or possible a crew from my local council flying over to deal with the mess.

The current ideas being floated (geddit?) to get the stricken boat moving again involve lightening it by syphoning off most of the fuel and removing the containers from it, so that a tug boat can get it shifted from the sand it’s lodged into. Alas these boats carry literally thousands of containers and the cranes are pretty specialist so the process of getting the boat to lose weight is going to go as slowly as if it were you or I trying to lose some weight before just like the boat going on a trip to Greece, or wherever it was that the boat was heading to.
All this of course takes place at the same time as the EU is trying to ban exports of Italian covid vaccines via the Mediterranean and the Suez canal and if the EU were competent you could call grounds for a dastardly conspiracy theory. Except as we’re all more than aware the EU is far too incompetent to pull something like that off. If it were the Panama Canal that was closed then yes I could see that they got the wrong location and they’d screwed it up and that would sound exactly like something Ursula von der Leyen would attempt. Similar to when they raided that Astrazeneca warehouse a few weeks ago and it later transpired that the vaccines in that location were actually a stock headed for Europe anyway and that they got the wrong address. Join me next week for more tales of EU misadventure.

Let’s go for a bit of financial news this week. Normally when stories about business make it into the headlines it means one of only 5 things:

1) Petrol Prices are up and the BBC blames it on Brexit
2) Petrol Prices are down and the BBC claim that it's the start of a Brexit-induced recession
3) Maybe petrol prices are flat but an economist from the Labour Party is brought on about wider Brexit-related economic concerns. You know, I'm starting to spot a trend here...
4) Maybe unemployment is up because George Osbourne keeps taking all of the jobs, to add to his roster of other pretend jobs and nepotistic directorships. And of course at that point someone points out that if it weren’t for the Brexit referendum he’d maybe still have his job at Westminster.
5) The perennial favourite, a football club that has gone into administration because of paying people £300k per peek to play football isn’t really a viable business. Sad news though of course for the fans though, plus the loss of 11 jobs, or perhaps more if you include the manager and the subs bench. Said news as well for the taxman as well, sometimes the footballers pay tax on their wages, if they’re at a mid-ranking club.

Anyway, the stock market. This week we’re talking about Gamestop, the computer game retailer which this time last year was $4 per share, started the year at $17 and a couple days ago hit $469 at traders piled in on the “event” and traders with keyboards competed with Gamestop fanatics who had presumably visited the store in order to pick up one fo those controllers with a Turbo button. At the heart of it all is the online trading site RobinHood where members of the public can log in and trade stocks and shares and derivatives products and given what happened it makes you wonder if they were asked for their username and password and instead entered the Konami Cheat code.

To break down what happened, the shares were seen as overvalued by some in the finance world so a lot of short sell options were placed. That’s when you place a bet by borrowing shares from other traders, sell them with an intent to buy them back later and effectively profit if the price goes down. But these positions are recorded and a group on Reddit spotted that they could cause a lot of damage if they manipulated the price upwards and so thus began a crowd-funded buying spike, sending the price upwards. In trading terms this means that the short sellers had a choice of either selling at a huge loss or buying yet more shares to cover their borrowed position, and this of course sends the price upwards further until it's higher than Jerry Garcia. This situation continues until enough people have been forced to sell out at a loss and the price can once more find it's true market price. Effectively it means crashing to earth and wiping out anyone who bought in at the top. As GameStop would say, it’s how you play they game that counts and the wall street firms were left haemorrhaging billions and looked like Sonic the Hedgehog when all the golden rings spill out of him. This is what Occupy Wall St spent years trying (unsuccessfully) to do, except they did it by setting up a shabby campsite, whereas the Reddit group behind this week’s events achieved it all sat luxury chairs in their office with cases of energy drinks and probably eying up a sports car or two with the money made from trading it back and forth, possibly a Tesla, ironically another share with suspicious activity on it. This was no 'workers of the world unite' moment though and the kids behind it were playing with mummy and daddy’s money but the reasons or cause are irrelevant so much as the outcome: namely the era of populist anti-establishment action did not die with the election of Joe Biden, anymore than than people’s dislike of Harry & Meghan didn’t die when they decided to flee the country with unpaid bills

Flash forward a day or two and the RobinHood trading app banned buying or selling of those Gamestop shares, which is interesting because there’s a series of financial links between Robinhood, the bank Citadel, and the GameStop business at the heart of it all. Go look it up elsewhere if you’re interested, it’s quite the rabbit hole. There’s also so many lawsuits now being filed against the company that the legal profession are envious for the workload they had when it was only President Trump trying to either sue a trade commission or maybe just scam a local contractor out of an invoice. The whole situation is actually so crazy that Ted Cruz, the darling of the right retweeted something from hardcore leftist Alexandria Cortez. It’s like when you find a Socialist Workers leaflet warning about the dangers of the EU and you realise just how bad things have to be for that broad a spectrum of people to be in agreement. I was going to make an analogy of the spectrum being from infra-red to ultraviolet, but if the hard left are involved then I guess that means it's pronounced “ultraviolent"

They say that "money talks" but when it comes to the government, all that ever says is good-bye as civil servants keep frittering it away like they're embarrassed to be seen with. And here you and I are watching it all from the sidelines, though I once met someone who says that the trick is to stop thinking of it as ‘your’ money.

Anyway, sit back as I count down some of the worse examples of UK government largesse

10) Nationalised industries
I thought I'd start of a prologue of sorts to show perhaps how bad things used to be. In the years after the 2nd world war, the government was in charge of a lot things but unlike someone playing the boardgames Monopoly, they didn't want to stop with just running the trains and all the utility companies. They went on to run travel companies, British Airways who made the planes for them, Rolls Royce who supplied the engines for the airplanes and BP who made the fuel. All run with balance sheets redder than Rudolph the Reindeers nose. The government also decided to get into the car game. A lot of people decide to buy a little 2-seater sports car when they're in their 60s but for the government in the 60s no less would do then buying up all the Jaguars and the MG factory as well plus Austin, Morris, Rover, the list goes on. British Leyland went on to lose roughly £100m per year, all in an pre-inflation era when a pint of beer was only 35p. Eventually almost everything was sold off and in 2002 Stephen Byers told people that Network Rail was officially a "not for profit" organisation as if anyone was under any illusions otherwise. Nowadays of course, the government has even started weaning itself off of bank ownership and the post office is free to lose money on behalf of investors rather than taxpayers. That last major injection of government cash was probably when David Cameron decided to spend millions posting a Brexit leaflet to everyone in the country and in the process convinced people who didn't like him to vote Leave in order to spite him. Evidently if Dave thought that god was looking down on him it was because he was plotting his revenge.

9) F35s
The harrier jump jet helped win the falklands war in 1982, the same year as the musical Cats opened on broadway, and both things lasted a very long time indeed. Nonetheless the sea harriers were in many respects also like another 1982 thing, namely the album Thriller by Michael Jackson who was universally applauded in the 80s then but was viewed as slightly tarnished by the turn of the millennium. Just like the Michael Jackson, the Harrier went through many cosmetic upgrades over the years before being discontinued as part of a defence review which led to the infamous F35 project, probably the most expensive project to come out of America that hasn't involved going to war, largely because decades on those F35 fighters are no closer to going to war than than the very pretend and very 2 dimensional thing that I'm drawing onto a piece of paper right now. Nonetheless, the cost to the UK taxpayer is somewhat shy of £10bn for a hundred or so aircraft, all of which will face numerous farcical problems on delivery like outdated software based on Windows XP and electrical issues that mean they have to stay 25 miles from thunderstorms. Sure you have to remember that the plane was being designed when the only conceivable use for them was flying over a never ending war on terror but the RAF do have a tendency to test these things in Scotland where a lot of the stories begin with the lines "it was a dark and stormy night" Many of the design problems haven't been helped by internal arguments between the navy or air force, or by changing government priorities, both in terms of spending money and whether or not to spend money in Gordon Brown's old constituency where the aircraft carriers were being fitted for the sea version. It is worth noting again that the Harrier was a 40year old design and woefully underprepared for a modern war. But at the same time it was probably better prepared than an empty runway or a telephone with which to dial someone else and beg for help if anything goes wrong in the meantime. The US are still using theirs until the new planes arrive. Although that's possibly like my doctors' surgery having a fax machine because they're still waiting on a new computer system to arrive, more on that later.

8) Gordon Brown’s gold sale
That sounds like a terrible gameshow on ITV 3 but it couldn't be a list like this without including this one. A lot of comedy is timing and as such you have to give credit to Tony Blair who generously allowed Gordon Brown to begin the premiership just in time for the biggest financial collapse in a generation. The political equivalent of a pie in the face, if John Prescott hadn't likely eaten all the pies first. Let's go with a different slapstick analogy perhaps. Gordon Brown spent 20 years crafting an image of himself as a clever financial whiz who boasted about "an end to boom and bust" before presiding over the largest boom and bust since the 1920s before seeing the whole thing blow up in his face like Wile E Coyote in one of the old Road Runner cartoons. Over the previous decade, Brown had carefully sold off huge quantities of pounds of gold at bargain basement prices, only to see that gold suddenly become the most sought after an expensive commodity in the world. It makes you wonder if when he gets home he has a cabinet full of Beanie Babies or whether his wife trusts him to visit the garden center in case he tries to get it back by remortgaging the house and buying up all the Dutch Tulips. There's a certain schadenfreude about Brown having presided over it, given that he was Shadow Chancellor during the ERM debacle 15 years earlier and spent 2 decades carping on about how only he could be trusted not to mess things up, but unfortunately it was not just his reputation he bet on that trade as the taxpayer ultimately lost around £5bn thanks to his negligence.

7) Foreign aid
One of the legacies of the British Empire was the large network of countries abroad that retain ties, both diplomatically and economically to the UK. Westminster is the mother of parliaments and countries like Australia, India and Kenya are Britain's children. At the same time though, I'm a parent and there's nothing I've learned from being a parent that I couldn't just as easily have figured out from setting fire to all my money. The UK spends roughly £15bn on foreign aid every year although the number is very difficult to pin down because so much of what is going on is classified as loans, export credit guarantees and the sort of financial dealings that made the government so keen to acquire the Royal Bank of Scotland and read it's training manual. There are of course some very worthy things that this money goes to but at the same time there the long list of ludicrous examples too such as continuing to write cheques to India who are supposedly so poor that they have active space program. The list of spurious uses of the foreign aid budget could itself be a separate top-10s video though it is important to note that the US spends $50bn on their equivalent budget, not including the line item simply marked as "Ukraine - don't ask questions" Much of what is going on is an international game of quid-pro-quo where payments to tinpot dictators have, over the years, resulted in business deals or mineral rights being pledged in return. David Cameron of course decided to frame the whole setup as an ethical one and made an equivalence of the government giving foreign aid to a normal person having a series of direct debits set up to mainstream highstreet charities. The sort of charities where they're run by one of Dave's friends on a 6-figure salary. I'm inclined to remember the expression that big charities are largely designed to transferring wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

6) The EU
Let's stick the foreign aid theme with the European Union, Britain may be out now but that was quite an expensive 47 years. The EU famously went for the naming style of using the word "union" in the same way that the Soviets did, or how many countries today use the term "Democratic" in their name. So here we go: there's an old saying that you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars. Well true to form the EU does have billions of Euros had has at the same time been repeatedly criticised for decades for being unable to produce accounts explaining any of it is hidden or what they've been spending it on. In many ways that fact alone was the cornerstone of how every aspect of the European project is reliant on backhanders, greasing the wheels of politics, money going purposefully missing in order to buy support against a public who saw their money being frittered away on vanity projects. All while the political aims were mainly failures, whether it being preventing the war in Yugoslavia, providing a unified approach to Covid19, fixing systemic financial problems in Southern Europe or producing a Eurovision Song Contest winner that anyone actually remembers. And note that the EU came into being with the Maastricht Treaty so ABBA doesn't count. There were lots of reasons for the 2016 Brexit vote, both social and economic but the vote would never have even come close to happening without decades of press-reported, almost weekly examples of taxpayer money being squandered. Comic books promoting the EU as a federal country, museums of EU nationhood, José Barroso once spent €28k on a four-night stay at New York's Peninsula Hotel. At the time of the vote, 214 senior eurocrats were being paid more than David Cameron. It was actually a strategy at the time of Cameron's: to force the EU to accept modernising and reform, and put its house in order and regain the public trust. None of that happened of course. In response the council failed to produce accounts, voted itself a bigger budget and told Britain that they'd have to pay regardless thanks to majority voting. And that it was David Cameron's responsibility to accept it or risk being the PM that took Britain out of the project. Which in retrospect is like threatening to give someone the keys to your car.


5 ID Cards and that IT system
In 2005, the government wanted to institute a biometric passport system that would require people to get new IDs and it would also require the government to get a shiny new computer system. The government estimated the cost of the IDs to be approximately £93 per person and the cost of the equipment to be about £5.8bn in total and even Alan Sugar in his 1980s heyday couldn't get you that many computer for that price. The true costs turned out to be about 3 times that at £300 per person and between £12bn and £18bn for the equipment, which presumably doesn't include the ongoing costs of the time spent by the civil service on the customer service hotline at £1.50/minute. The government recently upgraded the passport system in a £265 million contract with IBM which could only be justified on the basis that IBM sponsors Wimbledon so some of the money found its way to grass-roots tennis. A year or so ago The Independent investigated Labour’s 10 most well-known IT mistakes (I'm surprised they could narrow it down to 10) and they calculated a cumulative total of £26bn in wasted funds. The biggest waste was a £12.7bn plan for the NHS to start using new electronic records. Fewer than 200 out of 9,000 health organizations are using the technology despite the fact that the money was spent on it faster than a drunk sailor on shore leave.

4 Iraq
Looking back on things it's remarkable to believe that Tony Blair was once very popular and trustworthy, so much so that he convinced the UK to back an illegal invasion of Iraq. The strangest part was that he'd just spent years concluding the Good Friday Agreement and brought peace to Northern Ireland and he would probably have a moderately respectable reputation these days if he hadn't tried to boost his poll ratings by feigning a mid-Atlantic accent and getting involved in a war. The financial cost of Iraq & Afghanistan is quite a complicated mess. Officially it was around £8bn although that is a ludicrous under-costing and doesn't include, for instance, equipment that had already long been depreciated off the MOD balance sheet. Some forms of accounting place the number at more like £20bn, though again that still doesn't account for the long term health care of wounded troops which will linger for decades, or the cost of the resulting retaliatory attacks like 7/7, or the the rise of ISIS or when oil went to over $100/barrel and come to think of it I heard that a few people died, I actually have a friend who killed over 30 people in Iraq: going to be honest, he's probably by far the worse mechanic the RAF ever hired but the long and short of it is that the whole region in in just as bad a way as it ever was. Tony Blair, having learnt not a lot from the whole debacle still defends his decision to invade the place with other peoples money and lives, and these days continues to mull around in that part of the world as a "consultant" although given his propensity to cash in on things, I imagine the only reason he signed up to get involved in the West Bank, was because he thought he'd be on the board of directors at a bank.

3 Public Private Partnerships
There's an old joke about someone asking their careers advisor about pursuing a career in organised crime and the teacher responds by asking whether they were meaning the government or the private sector. So public private partnerships or PPP were an idea thought up whereby consultancy companies would pay for lots of shiny new schools and hospitals, then slowly sell them back to the government, "slowly" being the key word there. But it would mean that Gordon Brown could officially be seen to be borrowing less money, and debts wouldn't be shown on the balance sheet and the likes of Capita could afford to give everyone a big pay rise. I'm joking of course, it was just the senior management that got the pay rises. As an example, the shiny new St Bartholomew’s Hospital in central London cost $1.4bn to build, but will cost UK taxpayers $9.1bn by the end of the contract, or in the case of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, the government will never own it because it's perpetual lease in which the government can only get out of the bad contract by walking away and closing the hospital. Probably the only way the Chancellor could get out of it would be to just let the SNP get their way and have the thing if they want it so badly, like a divorcing couple arguing about which of them in on the hook for the timeshare they signed up to years prior, before Corona meant it was not only expensive but also illegal to visit the place.

2) Nuclear programs
If you don't know the price of nuclear power wait until you see the Cherno bill. I could make point as to whether I'm talking civil or military but the thing is that all the UK nuclear programs are part of the same machine. At least the French are honest enough to admit that they subsidise the nuclear electricity industry so that they can nuclear armed nuclear powered submarines. How does the UK play out? Well back in 2006, the government managed to sell the idea of the Trident Nuclear Missile System by citing a cost of less than £25bn. However, in an accounting manoeuvre presumably stolen from the desk of Robert Maxwell, this cost didn’t take into consideration the long-term costs of maintaining the equipment once it was in place. The real cost for this program ended up at more than three times the initial projections and again, this is before the contracts for the pre-requisite power stations were agreed, roughly £20bn. Each. The real problem here was that the government forged ahead with the plan without actually allowing a debate to take place. More recently a sensible debate was impossible, in part because of Brexit and the involvement with the French. But largely because the opposition party was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a man who on paper passional despised nuclear weapons yet at the same time was unable to decide whether Russia or Iran having them was ok or not. Before he was forced to step down I always wondered if he would discover that the sun is in fact a large thermonuclear reaction, and therefore make it Labour party policy to "open a dialogue" with the sun and ask it to please stop shining. A policy that would no doubt go down well with Owen Jones who thinks the sun shines out of his rear end.

1) HS2
The go-ahead for the High Speed 2 railway to the Midlands (or possibly Scotland) comes in as the biggest public project in peacetime at a cost of anywhere from £32bn to perhaps £100bn depending on the price of land and who you ask and what route they eventually choose. It's egregious enough that it attracts an interesting set of activists from across the political spectrum being forced to act together. One one hand you have traditionalists who object to profligate waste and destruction and the colossal cost. And they're being forced to hold hands with the green activists who like trains, but whom also dislike the concept of long distance travel in general and they hate bulldozing the countryside but they also take delight in it largely carving its way through and spoiling the sorts of places that voted for Boris and for Brexit. HS2 is at this point the definition of sunk cost fallacy, nobody wants to be the person who admits that the fortune so far spent was money wasted that could have gone on better things. There's probably a joke in there about the government wanting to cover their tracks or what there loco-motives are at this stage. Either way it's a ludicrous vanity project that will ultimately save commuters about 20 minutes on the trip between Birmingham and London, and all being planned at a time when businesses are forging plans for people to mostly work from home in the future. Forget the idea of upgrading existing rail lines, or building a genuinely new line like the oft-talked about Stranraer to Northern Ireland sea-tunnel (costed at only about £6bn) And forget about that high speed line going as far as Glasgow or Edinburgh. It is really saying something that the part of the rail link that would link Scotland to London and bring potential financial benefits to Scotland, paid for by London, was ruled out because even the SNP failed to back the dubious financials underwriting the whole project. That's like offering to buy Oliver Reed a drink and him turning it down because he'd had enough.

I guess to sum it up, part of life is living with a government that behaves like Oliver Reed. Occasionally professional, often respected on the world stage, but also incredibly keen to liquidise your assets. When it comes to spending myself though? I guess I'll always remember some advice I was once given which was that it’s worth it to spend money on good speakers. That was some sound advice.

I'm writing this on July 18th and that's Richard Branson's birthday, maybe somebody got him a train set for it, hopefully not the government though because that was very very expensive last time.

What else is in the news? I see that Shamima Begum is also trying to return to the UK, something about losing an appeal. Appeal? I didn't think she appealed to anyone, other than the sorts that probably want a statue of her put on that plinth in Bristol. The guardian can call her stateless for all they want but she looked like she was in a right state the last time folks saw her running about trying to kill people. I also saw an article on Coronavirus and how the acting profession are fearful that some theatres may never open again after lockdown. Why do they have to make a song and dance about everything?. There's also a new disease on on the loose: Bubonic plague! A Chinese city has issued a black death level three warning. Well, 2020 is the year of the rat.

I guess though, the big story this week seems to be the Twitter/Bitcoin hacking scam which in my mind reassured me that the world is still kind of the same and that fools and there money are easily parted. Earlier this week some hackers managed to take control of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Barack Obama's Twitter accounts and posted a tweet saying that as a charitable act, anyone who sent money to a certain anonymous Bitcoin account would get twice the amount paid back. This on the surface looks remarkably suspicious. Designed to appeal to the sort of people as lazy as whoever it was that named the fireplace. But the internet is populated with idiots, the sort of people who think that pharmacists work on farms and boast that they can still fit into the same shoes that they wore 10 years ago. People being stupid on the internet? That expectation is the price of entry.

Nonetheless, this is probably the least dubiously legal thing to happen with bitcoin this year and it's the least dubious business thing to involve Elon Musk this year. I have a bitcoin wallet and it's a nice little hedge against economic collapse that can't be seized or stolen through inflation, but I largely have it through greedy speculation that the price jumps 10-fold. It's not a proper investment and nobody's in it for anything other than the off-chance of getting rich. And anyone that thinks that Elon Musk is going to give them a thousand dollars is either deluded, or they're perhaps just Elon Musk's lawyer charging by the hour for whatever mess he's gotten himself into this time, mostly likely on Twitter ironically. Which was ironically also on Twitter. And as for the rest at least when it was Obama or Joe Biden's twitter account claiming to give away free money folks should know better not to trust it, because they're politicians.

Royal news this week as Prince Harry announced that he and his wife are as fed up with the tabloids as the rest of us, and want to resign from royal life although it's unclear at this stage whether he will be changing his name to "formally known as prince" like the singer or similarly swapping his signature to a strange symbol. I imagine that official calligraphers and people involved with heraldry are more concerned about their job than whoever ends up getting the new job in charge of Iran's military. That was another story this week, the US threatening to drag us all into into World War III, maybe Harry just quit because he was worried he was going to get called up for military service again and a war with Iran would probably be the one thing on this planet potentially more dysfunctional than being in the Royal family.

What we do know is that the decision was a private one and he didn't discuss it with the Queen, or his dad, or Prince Charles for that matter. The public are also being left with more unanswered questions then one of my old latin exams. For all the couple claim a desire to be financially independent they're currently costing the best part of a million quid a year in security details alone; we know that Harry has some cash left to him by his mother but that was a long time ago and we all saw the photos of him in Las Vegas, maybe he has plans to start up some kind of trendy financially sustainable version of Charles' Duchy Originals, like a craft ale brewery, or perhaps he could try the same kind of financial scheme that his prince friends in Nigeria use to earn money

For what it's worth I hope that they do make a decent go of it and stop living on taxpayers money. Although I suspect that the whole thing is driven by an attention seeking desire to spend more time spreading Meghan's woke messages on climate change and gender equality. A message on climate change that will be spread by someone advertising that they plan to spent a large amount of their time flying between the UK and Canada whilst running up a carbon footprint larger than the time his grandmother's castle in Windsor burnt down.

One thing before I end is to raise awareness of the somewhat suppressed scandal involving the revelation that that the Canadian mansion in which the couple recently spent several weeks staying at is allegedly owned by a Russian Billionaire who the couple have refused to name. Still, it's better than the billionaires that Harry's uncle Andy was hanging out with.

The US trade war escalated this week as President Trump announced a new 5% trade tariff on Mexico. It's 5% on everything coming over the border and that rate is primed to go up faster than Boris Johnson's upcoming legal bill with analysts saying it could quickly ramp to 10%, 20%, 40% maybe. Very much like when I'm making margaritas.

The US-Mexico tariffs: ostensively it's to do with immigration and paying for a border wall, in reality it's likely got a lot to do with diverting the news from the Chinese trade war which has been getting perilously close to the bit where newsreaders start to discuss inescapable supply chains and it starts to make it look like it may be a worse deal for consumers than that time that Samsung tried selling $2k foldable phones that broke when you folded them. Mexico however, its largest exports to the US are vehicles and machinery, most of which is from US owned companies who outsourced 10-20 years ago, so the emphasis is really on relocating those manufacturing jobs back to the US. Although given how corrupt the system is, it could equally just be that the grain whisky producers want to destroy the tequila market in much the way that they destroyed my memory of last Sunday afternoon.

If I were in charge, I'd avoid all this and get rid of the tax deductiosn companies receive when they outsource. Whatever happens though, a lot of this is being done with zero oversight and perhaps it might work out well in the end but it seems like there's a lot on the line here. It's like writing me a large cheque to come to a party as a balloon modeller, and I've guaranteed I can make animals, but then on the day it turns out that all I know how to make are snakes, balloon snakes. And I've already cashed the cheque and spent the money on a new wall by now and some gin, because that isn't subject to the aforementioned import tariffs.

Sometimes discussions about economics are nuanced and complex, just imagine the difficulty trying of trying to discuss the fishing industry’s net worth or the construction industry’s aggregate demand. Sometimes they say the point of studying PPE (politics philosophy and economics) is that at least when you’re unemployed you’ll be able to discuss in depth the reasons why.

Well the world of economics is back in the news now with President Trump proceeding with a wide range of import tariffs on Chinese products. Friday saw the level of existing tariffs rise from 10 to 25% and Saturday saw the tariffs imposed on all remaining imports, not just those previously announced. For consumers, it will be a bit like when the health inspector forces your Chinese takeaway to close, or at least stop serving seafood, and when it reopens a few weeks later the old owner’s brother has raised the prices. Except in this case the money will go straight to the government and you won’t get any fortune cookies for filing a tax return on a regular basis.

In terms of impact, some manufacturing will return to the US, though other industries with complex logistics chains will have no alternative but to pass on the costs and continue buying from overseas, at least for years to come. A tax rise for all intents and purposes, equivalent to a 10% sales tax by the time the goods are being paid for at the checkout. I say checkout, even with 10% price increases, it's still better than having your online purchases stolen from your doorstep, although if you're trying to get rid of an old mattress or broken television and the council are wanting a week's wages to remove it, why not put it in an amazon box and let the thieves do it for free?

Anyway, the tariffs, they're expected to bring in anywhere from $100-300bn at a time when the budget could do with some balancing. Bizarrely though, those on the left who are calling for higher taxes are the first to criticise these taxes because of course they would, anything the President does must be wrong. In many respects, if President Trump wants to leave a long lasting legacy, then he should make sure that when he leaves office he writes a book demanding action on climate change, gender rights and an open border policy, thus making every last one of them toxic for any left wing politician to advocate for.

Celebrity gossip news this week as Jeff Bezos accused the publishers of National Enquirer of trying to blackmail him, in a salacious story that really brought home the difference between real world billionaires and those we grew up with such as Bruce Wayne or Scrooge McDuck who to my knowledge was never involved in a extramarital affair although he has been known to express a worrying predilection for gold coins which in the US feature a picture of Native American lady Sacagawea.

Anyway Shortly after Jezz Bezos' divorce was announced last month, the National Enquirer was suspiciously quick to publish intimate details and threatened to publish photographs if Mr Bezoz didn't stop investigating who their source was. Just like a good magician, a newspaper never reveals its secrets, unless of course they're commanded to by a court like that time Piers Morgan discovered he could invent stories in Adobe Photoshop.

With the Bezos story however, there's an undercurrent that beyond the gossip there is a political game being played here. The publishers AMI had demanded that the Amazon owner make a "false public statement" denying any political motivation for the National Enquirer's coverage of him and his mistress. There's the angle that Mr Bezos owns the Washington Post which had published the story about Jamal Khashoggi's murder by the Saudi government and it was around the time that publisher AMI had been linked to Saudi investment. Thinking back to Scrooge McDuck at least when he went to the middle east to make a killing it was by means of a treasure map.

At this point the story is either yesterday's news soon to be forgotten in favour of something about Jennifer Anniston, or it is but the start of a 2 hour long voyage through the YouTube conspiracy theory videos that ultimately leave you scratching your head about 9/11, the origins of ISIS, whether the earth is hollow like the promises made in a manifesto, and whether we can perhaps get back to boring news next week, like Brexit or the upcoming recommencement of the US Government Shutdown.

There's that old joke about what's black and white and red all over, to which the answer is either a newspaper, or the corporate balance sheet of a newspaper in the digital age. Nonetheless, the leaves are starting to turn red and so were a lot of stock markets this week with the FTSE 100 dropping below 7000 points. Not to be mistaken for dropping 7000 pints, which is what Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed and used to call a "fun weekend."

Share prices have been going up for the past 10 years and the last time we had a market crash, Prince William had a full head of hair and Netflix was a company that physically posted DVDs to you in the post. Stock market losses in the past week have been attributed to many things, the US trade war with China, Brexit uncertainty, US midterm election uncertainty not to mention the reptilian overlords that David Icke likes to write conspiracy books about. I've always thought that if he were correct and the Queen was secretly a reptile, the bedrooms at Buckingham Palace would have a lot more UV strip lighting in them.

Anyway, the economy. What is certain is that central banks have allowed an asset bubble to grow well beyond anything that can be controlled sensibly and at this point the only question is whether there will be a crash and defaults when investors realised that rates are rising and the game is up, or whether inflation will kick in with regular savers bailing out the markets and bond-holders by stealth. I was going to make an analogy of the stock market being a bit like the bus at the end of The Italian Job, except at least in the Italian Job there was a big stack of gold to help them out, and the Italians in that film still had their own currency rather than being held in bondage by political forces at the ECB.

What is also true is that whatever happens, Theresa May and President Trump will be given 100% of the blame. Or to be more specific, Trump will be 40% responsible, Theresa will be 40% responsible, Brexit 30% responsible, and the fact that those add up to well over 100% will not be entirely surprising given the academic pedigree of the armchair economists that will be invited to provide punditry to the masses. The sort of people that need to give you change when you offer them a penny for their thoughts.

America has given us baseball, jazz and just as importantly (and depressingly) a culture in which top lawyers are treated like Babe Ruth and Louis Armstrong rolled into one and this past week saw more legal drama than a whole series of Perry Mason as the investigation into the 2016 election cracked up a notch.

Paul Manafort, the president's campaign chairman was found guilty on 8 counts consisting of tax fraud, bank fraud, hiding foreign bank accounts, and now faces 240 years in jail. That's a long time to be in prison, though if he uses some sort of magic sorcery to remain alive then all that money he's hidden overseas will np doubt have accrued enough interest for him to return more powerful than ever, no doubt to help participate in an election where one of the candidates is Hilary Clinton's brain in a glass jar, trying for one last shot at the Oval Office.

Joining him in prison will most likely be Michael Cohen, Mr Trump's personal lawyer, who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to eight criminal charges, including tax evasion, bank fraud, campaign finance violations as well as possibly worse of all, having made Stormy Daniels into a media celebrity, like a somehow more downmarket version of Katie Price. I was about to say Kardashian there, which would be somewhat ironic because the Kardashians father was actually the lawyer who defended OJ Simpson in the trial of last century. Anyway, he's hoping for lenient sentencing for being corporative so it might be 60 years, it might be 3 years, same sort of time frame as when you get locked into a bad phone contract.

Other faces now showing up on the news include David Pecker, head of the company that publishes the Trump favourite National Enquirer as well as Allen Weisselberg, The Trump Organization's finance boss, both of whom this week were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperating with Robert Mueller's office. Presumably the part of the office where Robert himself is sitting. Sitting I'm guessing and wondering to himself where all the Russian hackers are and why it's all just financial crimes. If it is a witch hunt then I guess it's one in which the witches get burnt at the stake for not paying capital gains after turning the lead into gold.

The big story of the past week was the stock market which has been dropping faster than pro-democracy candidates in a Russian election.

The FTSE 100 finished the week down nearly 400 points and the Dow Jones put in 2 historic record-breaking falls before recovering to “only” finish the week 1100 points down and if things get much worse, ExxonMobile will have to start laying off congressmen.

Of course, those people who’ve been holding onto their Carillion shares or their Bitcoins probably think “5% what’s the big deal?” but it’s been 10 years since we last had a market crash and this was but a prelude, it’s like in those old Road Runner cartoons where Wile E Coyote is in the air looking down at the gorge.

So with no stock market rally for President Trump to tweet about, what was the White House's reaction? Well the US tried to bolster markets by agreeing in a somewhat bipartisan manner to blowing the deficit into the stratosphere and passing a budget plan that makes Jeremy Corbyn’s plans for office look parsimonious in comparison. Still not enough? Well let’s have more bread and circuses! President Trump also suggested having a massive military parade and the Winter Olympics just started in Korea. Personally, I always think the Winter Olympics is a missed opportunity really. It would be fun if one year they used the same sports as they do during the regular summer olympics but did them in the snow. Obviously combining archery and ice would be a health and safety nightmare but it would be fun to see the Scandinavians dominating the outdoor swimming events or the Scottish track and field team win a gold medal before passing around a thermos flask of bovril. Oh well, if things go badly with the North Korean situation, we'll end up with a nuclear winter and then the Summer and Winter Olympics will likely look indistinguishable.

One of the UK's most popular highstreet stores is Marks & Spencers and if you're a shareholder then you're probably hoping to benefit from the free advertising now offered by the new Royal couple-to-be: Markles and Spencer, also known as Harry and Meghan. I imagine that with those initials, the marketing team at highstreet rival, "H&M" will also be rubbing their hands. The wedding is set for next spring and hopefully won't coincide with the Grand National like when Prince Charles got married. So many questions though, who will design the dress? Will Meghan be able to bypass the immigration bureaucracy in time to get a British Passport? Will James Hewitt use the wedding as a path to obtain himself an American passport?

It's also unclear whether the UK will get a national holiday or time off work for it. Let's cut to the chase, a lot of us are primarily concerned about whether we too will be allowed to act like royalty, spend a weekday doing not very much work and knock back gin at 10 in the morning. Bear in mind folks that next year St Patrick's day falls on a Saturday so it would be nice if the couple could be decent, save the taxpayer a few quid and coordinate some kind of booze fuelled madness sponsored by the good people at Guinness.

The whole thing does also open up the curiously vague possibility though that a future child would be able to make a run for the US presidency and then later potentially inherit the British throne. Open your eyes people: the house of Windsor are in the process of running the longest con in history and the yanks are falling for it hook, line and sinker.

If they are planning on something along those lines they could do worse than ask Michael Flynn how not to go about things. News just in this week was that he's admitted to lying to the FBI about a meeting with the Russians. It's not really news of course, we've known about most of this since back in February and time will tell whether he implicates anyone in anything. I suspect if there was anything going on other than stupidity then a smoking gun would have come to light. I'd would like Trump haters to once and for all clarify where precisely they stand on things though: do they think president is [a] a moronic imbecile incapable of running a bath or [b] a Machiavellian genius scheming with the upper echelons of the KGB. As I said, time will tell.

Some years budgets can be really exciting with sweeping tax cuts or dramatic gestures but this week it was fairly dull asides from the furore about the tax rise for self employed people.Why self employed people, I asked myself, then I read at article saying that George Osborne is set to earn £650,000 this year and I wondered if Phillip Hammond and Theresa May were setting up an elaborate trap for their predecessors. I’ve not looked at the detail of the budget but I’d be keen to know if there was a special levy on political speeches and ex-cabinet ministers.

It’s largely a storm in a teacup though, a pound or two per week. When I’m not doing these videos, I am actually a self employed person myself and in all honesty, whilst annoying, I half wondered if it’s a price worth paying? After all, every minute of Radio 4 that’s taken up with backbenchers discussing white vans is a minute that’s not being used to discuss Brexit. Every time they wheel out an economist to discuss NI contributions it means a whinging policy adviser will have to stay at home and keep their views on exercise or alcohol to themselves.

In the mean time though it was also International Womens’ Day this week, although from what I saw, most of the supposedly “international” women on the telly were in fact British. Or as Nicola Sturgeon would pronounce it, “English” before adding “treacherous” and demanding a referendum in much the same way that my little boy demands more toast in the mornings…