Food costs are going to be more challenging in the next 5y Climate change is the most obvious driver Climate policy will pressure cheap livestock alongside higherwelfare standards Growing labour costs in Asia and a lack of productivity gains in African agri Higher rates also impactful
Eventually China's property market in aggregate will stabilise and return to growth At that point much of the problem of global imbalances will recede There's a very good chance that any protectionist response from the EU/ US will COINCIDENTALLY look very effective
I keep being fed Gary Stevenson content by the algos and it's got me wondering He claims to have been betting on inequality getting worse for 15y and making great returns from it How *do you* structure a trade that is long inequality?
This feels like a paragraph that could be extremely famous one day
Brazil faces unforgiving economics after election - www.ft.com/content/d47f... via @FT "If the primary budget surplus rose to 1 per cent in 2027, 1.75 per cent in 2028 and 2.5 per cent thereafter while nominal growth was near 6.5 per cent, net debt could stabilise around 68 per cent of GDP by 2030"
Brazil faces unforgiving economics after election
Whoever wins the presidential race will have to face up to the need for fiscal consolidation
ft.com
Reminder that flows never really recovered from the first time around
Shipwreck@shipwreck75.bsky.social · 2w agoTrump on Red Sea and Bab Al-Mandeb: “If something like that happens, we take care of it,” Trump says. “We’ve done it with the Houthis before.” “If there is something like that, we’ll just have to take care of business.”
There's stories that Andy Burnham will increase international aid spending from the current 0.2% of GDP to 0.7% of GDP If he does it will be one of the best uses of money the UK does and he should be incredibly proud of what it means
Construction output down 0.8% m/m (est. -0.3%); down 1.8% y/y We should obviously stimulate the construction sector
It's amazing that we're on the cusp of having a prime minister whose views and priorities are basically a complete mystery
The ‘innovators and disrupters’ hired to bring AI to the UK public sector - www.ft.com/content/4df5... via @FT "Tarr creates custom AI tools that save prison officers thousands of hours of bureaucratic drudgery each month" Super
The ‘innovators and disrupters’ hired to bring AI to the UK public sector
Government fellowship scheme places tech experts on ‘high-impact tours of duty’ to improve services
ft.com
specifically, the part where the proceeds are remitted "according to their population". It's devolution without the upside: what local authority is going to bother investing in local growth when their portion of the local tax revenue remains the same regardless of how much money they raise?
The chronic and the catastrophic Fighting every small forest fire (chronic risk) prevents regular small scale fires Dead brush accumulates without the chronic events which turns manageable hazards into a rare but total megafire (catastrophic risk)
You'd struggle to capture the worldview of anti-growth ideologues better in a single paragraph than this UK political advisors are a different breed
On face value two of Burnham's core proposals are in conflict * allow more revenue to be retained locally * more investment for the north There's ways both of the following _can_ be true but I'd like to hear more about Burnham's plan to make it so
George Eaton@georgeeaton.bsky.social · last mo.Good to hear Burnham champion often overlooked London devolution – London currently keeps just 7% of the tax revenue it generates, compared to 50% in New York and 70% in Tokyo.
India green energy transition heading in the right direction? Indian solar power generation is up c.40% y/y Wind power generation up c.20% y/y Coal production and imports down c.10% y/y and c.12% y/y
31% of men and 19% of women have negative returns to their UG degrees 40% of student loans have a negative return for the chancellor This is significantly related to subject choice From the IFS: 'New estimates of the impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings'
Sometimes good things are good. Sunshine? Good. Aircon? Also good
Supply is not the reason that you cannot expand housebuilding Construction wages are falling off a cliff and are negative -3.5% in real terms Look at brick production at somewhere like Ibstock, they say capacity utilisation is at c.65% (and falling..)
'Big' projects in the UK are low value because of regulatory burdens and planning uncertainty We can keep trying new ones and the bang for buck will continue to be terrible with a small number of exceptions
Congratulations to Jonathan Haskel. An excellent nomination for the OBR Chair
The bad news is that this keeps happening and there's clearly something seriously wrong with the ONS The good news is that nobody trusts the survey data anymore and generally lean on admin data instead UK statistics agency admits fresh error over key jobs data - www.ft.com/content/137b... via @FT
UK statistics agency admits fresh error over key jobs data
ONS warns of ‘level of reduced quality’, in setback to efforts to restore confidence in closely watched figures
ft.com
Detractors of large projects in the UK rarely bother saying that the projects are bad They prefer to say that they're a distraction for the government even if the projects are financed and operated by the private sector Just how bad do they think state capacity is that they can't even manage that?
