Keynes vs Hayek

Macroeconomics meets rap: something of a novel approach to the age-old Keynesian vs monetarist debate! Classic ‘wish-I’d-thought-of-this’ moment…

Talking the Thatcherite talk

I have rarely hoped for a newspaper story to be true more than this one from the Telegraph: UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron has pledged to consider tightening the regulation on trade unions if they try to get in the way of public sector pay freezes designed to help reduce the £178m debt mountain whoever wins the next election will be faced with. I could go into some quite extraordinary detail on the economic reasons why a union-enforced minimum wage severely distorts the supply of and demand for labour in the economy, but I’d either be preaching to the converted or bashing my head against a brick wall in the case of economic liberals and socialists respectively.

Rather, to indicate that the necessary public support for a bit more squeezing of the unions is definitely out there, here’s a little featurette of RMT General Secretary (and member of the ‘Awkward Squad’ of union leaders) Bob Crow’s altercations with Ian Hislop on Have I Got News For You from a couple of months back. Just listen to the audience’s reaction to pretty much everything Crow says…

A brief history of climate change

Just saw a gargantuan poster on a link at Devil’s Kitchen and felt the need to perform the blogging version of a retweet: so here it is. It traces in astounding detail the history of the climate change scare – which is undoubtedly a very recent phenomenon, since as late as the 1990s the ‘prevailing scientific consensus’ we’re all supposed to be so impressed by was still spreading doom and gloom about global cooling and the need for mankind to artificially warm up the planet if we were to survive the impending ice age. Due to the lack of the same sort of global communications possibilities that we have today, this argument – phrased in no less passionate or scientific a way than the current global warming hypothesis – simply didn’t catch on.

Perhaps the most interesting factoid to come out of this massive PDF is that, according to NASA, the Pacific Ocean has been in its long-term cool phase since April 2008. Here’s the relevant extract (Wikipedia links mine):

Pacific switches strongly to the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO is a long-term alternation of the Pacific between cool and warm periods. Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate. During most of the 1980s and 1990s, when the Earth warmed, the Pacific was locked in its warm phase.

I’ve had La Niña thrown at me by AGW-enthusiasts before in response to my last blogpost on climate change. It sounds to me like this PDO mechanism pretty much trumps anything that La Niña and El Niño have to offer in the way of their impact on global climate. But, even more tellingly, climate scientists have yet to identify how either of these two mechanisms actually works – so everything we’ve been seeing of late, including the recent cold snap in Europe and the data that the CRU scientists tried to fiddle to squeeze it into their idea of what a temperature model should look like, will have been heavily impacted on by climate features we simply cannot explain.

So how can we be so sure that carbon emissions have a qualifiable, quantifiable impact on world temperatures? The answer is: we can’t. Simples.

Education, education, education?

The Times has just released the most recent school league tables for A-level and GCSE results, and the verdict on Labour’s achievements in the field of education is truly damning:

Of the top 50 schools with the highest scores at A level, all but three were in the independent sector.

And those three?

The three state schools to make the top 50 for A-level results were Latymer School in Enfield, Kendrick school in Reading and Henrietta Barnett School in North London. All are grammar schools.

In other words, for all Labour’s bleating about the resource asymmetries that disadvantage comprehensive schools relative to the private, public and grammar alternatives, they have done NOTHING about changing this in nearly 13 years of virtually unopposed government. All they have done, and here current Schools Minister Ed Balls is a primary culprit, is produce “an initiative a week” to increase the ‘accountability’ (read: enslavement) of state schools and limit the freedom of action of independent schools. Such as the Mandarin and Arabic lessons primary school pupils are now supposed to be given amid yet more ineffectual spending pledges and empty guarantees. And the academies – where a frankly pathetic 0.9pc of pupils achieved more than 5 A*s at GCSE.

Spend, spend, spend – but on what? Ringfencing the education budget – but what happens with it? It clearly doesn’t go on the wages of teachers in the public sector – which have yet to even get close to the levels in the private sector – and anyway, no-one in their right mind would choose to work in an underpaid state job with rebellious and often violent pupils who they cannot punish for fear of being labelled child molesters, when the alternative is the private sector without all the crippling regulation and with pupils who come from a pro-education family culture, or even outside education entirely. All that Labour has done in a cynical attempt to equalise education levels has been to drag down the wealthy and the intelligent to the level of those unable or unwilling to put as much time/effort into education.

Here’s an example of the sort of meaningless measures that have dominated education policy since 1997: the recently-published primary league tables show that 900 primary schools are failing to teach children the basic skills of  accurate reading, writing and arithmetic – so OBVIOUSLY the ONLY POSSIBLE SOLUTION is to tell 1400 primary schools to improve so that at least 55pc of their pupils have these skills. Where does the 55pc come from? What about the other 45pc who think that 2 + 2 = 5 and that the alphabet is just a mysterious collection of dots and lines? And why 1400 schools – by what criteria are the extra 500 schools borderline cases? And of course, how is telling schools to improve their results going to result in them doing so? Threat of closure? Great – less kids getting any education, more teachers on the dole. And of course closing the school implies that somebody or something FAILED somewhere along the line – and to Labour there is no such thing as failure, merely ‘deferred success’… and bourgeois intransigence on the part of critics who need to be Told the Truth. So the initiative collapses amid another spending splurge in the classic socialist hope that throwing money stolen from rich people at a problem will just make it go away.

The Conservatives and Lib Dems both seem to agree that cutting the nonsense regulation and federalising education provision to the local level – independent state schools, crackdown on bad behaviour, increasing teacher-to-pupil ratios, school vouchers for parents – is the way to go. Competition over centrally-driven homogeneity – yes. No more top-down empty targets – also yes. But until teaching becomes an attractive profession again, and teachers are treated less like childminders and more like knowledge communicators, even these policies won’t be enough.

The wasteland of modern society

It’s not often that I see two news stories in succession that make me want to tear out my hair, but today was just one such rare occasion:

Story #1: Mylene Klass was cautioned by police following an incident at her home in which some youths tried to break into her house until she scared them off by waving a kitchen knife at them. Apparently carrying an “offensive weapon” – in this case a perfectly normal knife – is illegal even within one’s own home. I’m sorry, but WHAT?! So every time anyone takes out a knife in the presence of another person for whatever reason – slicing potatoes, garden work &c included – they’re breaking the law?? Surely it’s bad enough already that people who try to defend their families and property from violent intruders are treated as though they‘re the ones who’ve done something wrong without the ability to fight back being made completely illegal? Does the state honestly expect every law-abiding homeowner to become an expert in karate on the off-chance that someone tries to break in?

Story #2: General David Petraeus, the US commander-in-chief for the Middle East region, has effectively confirmed that the USA are seriously considering bombing Iran to force them to accept the deal with 5 of the UN Security Council permanent members (UK, USA, France, Russia, Chine) + Germany. Or perhaps more accurately, they are trying to pave the way for someone to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities on the USA’s say-so. Now while I am unconvinced that the facilities in Qom are meant to serve purely peaceful civilian purposes, I cannot believe that the USA has still failed to learn its lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan and still plans on resolving everything via gunboat diplomacy in the last resort.

I really sometimes shudder at what a sick and perverse world we live in nowadays.

Too much tax?

Well at least count yourself lucky that you’re not French. The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy are apparently mulling a ‘Google tax’, according to an article in the Telegraph (and here on the BBC too). Yes, that’s right, a tax that is levied on Google “every time a French internet user clicks on an advertising banner or sponsored link on its sites” – despite the fact that Google’s European operations are based in Ireland. Typically, the justification for this ridiculous tax has been phrased in catch-all centrist language – talking about putting an end to “enrichment without any limit or compensation” – mixed with Gaullist rhetoric about defending France’s cultural heritage from “digital predators”.

Quite apart from how unlikely it is that this proposal ever sees the legal light of day – “web professionals”, as the Telegraph calls them, seem to consider its implementation laughably improbable – I rather doubt that it is the French culture that Sarkozy & co are trying to protect. Part of the principle of grandeur that underlies Gaullist conservatism is a preparedness beyond conventional German- or Dutch-style Christian democrats and well beyond UK Conservatives to impose mind-blowingly protectionist measures with the express aim of skewing the French economy in favour of French industry and business – dirigisme, in other words, on economic as well as social and cultural matters.

Simply put, Sakozy’s UMP party-bloc are a bit miffed that European internet users as a whole are so heavily reliant on US technology – technology which was allowed to evolve and flourish by the comparatively liberal economic situation in the USA – so they intend to jealously punish the success of the companies that developed it to raise resources they might use to prop up the sclerotic equivalent industries in France. No guarantee that the cash would not be siphoned off to line any pockets or – worse – tipped into the black hole of wider public spending (feeding an overweight bureaucracy and absurdly strong labour market regulation).

Bluntly, it is irrelevant in the long run whether French businesses have been “weakened by the digital revolution” – if there is any intrinsic value in any firm, any demand for what it produces, regardless of where it comes from or who runs it, then it will survive. If there isn’t, it won’t. And propping them up in the short run against the economic odds merely delays the inevitable and lulls the poor souls dependent on them for income into toxic reliance on the state instead of giving them the chance to acquire some more transferable skills to apply themselves in an alternative firm or industry. Yes, “in the long run we are all dead” – but short-termism along French lines is a guaranteed way of ensuring that the domestic economy is dead in the long run too.

This proposal comes at the same time as a new anti-piracy law takes effect in France to ensure that ‘repeat illegal downloaders’ are fined and prevented from using the internet – a classic use of property rights defence to shield the interests of a notoriously cliquey top-end minority of firms in a highly crowded but asymmetrically competitive industry. Seems Sarkozy & co have realised they do need to pander to the market after all… So again, count yourself lucky you’re not French. Unless of course you are, in which case I offer you my heartfelt free-market libertarian condolences…

The race to succeed Berlusconi

The Telegraph has an interesting opinion piece on what I will call the imminent ’succession crisis’ on the right of Italian politics. Up until the point at which Silvio Berlusconi was hit in the face with a replica of the Duomo in Milan on 13.xii., I would have predicted the slow and unpleasant demise of the right wing of Italian politics in the immediate future. Several conditions certainly favour the left, not least the presence of well-respected ex-communist principe rosso Giorgio Napolitano as Italian president, and obviously the recent (at times frankly bizarre) scandals that have plagued the libertinist private life of current premier Berlusconi.

But perhaps of clearer political impact is the relative unity and stability of the left- and right-wing party-blocs – the Partito Democratico (PD) on the left contains many strands of left-wing thought (from liberal centrism to unrepentant communism) but sustains a fairly stable internal balance of structure and power. On the right, however, is Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL), only recently fused out of the pro-business Forza Italia and the neo-fascist Alleanza Nazionale. Fewer ideological strands, but ones that are far better defined – and a governing alliance with the regionalist Lega Nord that can crumble at any moment over the issue of net public spending outflow from the rich north to the impoverished south of the country.

Berlusconi is (like Vladimir Putin in Russia) the only element holding the shaky edifice together – and in view of the decline in his personal fortunes over the last year it would not be unreasonable to consider the possibility of a decrystallisation and fragmentation on the Italian right that threatens to leave them in the doldrums much like the UK Conservatives have been for most of the last 13 years. If he himself cannot recover, then he needs to name a strong successor – and fast. Step forward Gianfranco Fini – long-time leader of the neo-fascists, now (like many politicians from all corners of the Italian spectrum) reinvented as a moderate, even a liberal (by Italian standards). A maverick voice within PdL, he certainly has the stature to take on the ‘high-brow’ PD elite, and the charisma to develop PdL into a more mainstream variant of the ‘national liberalism‘ espoused by ‘new right’ parties in Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands – I am thinking particularly of the Fortuynists, Geert Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid and the late Jörg Haider’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs.

At the moment, the attack on Berlusconi has forced something of a hiatus in Italian politics – the protestations regarding the ‘confidence vote’ crackdown on debate about the 2010 budget aside – but it will be interesting to watch what happens in this still-young and volatile system over the next few months. My personal view is that Berlusconi is likely to survive, albeit narrowly and only with heavy reliance on the resurgent PdL elite and the Lega Nord – I expect that Fini will become the ‘natural successor’, although given the traditional mutual suspicion of Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale it remains to be seen whether this will mean that the PdL has to turn to the centrist Unione di Centro (UdC) for coalition support before the end of the current parliamentary mandate.

Noël, Noël…

Where I come from, Christmas is traditionally celebrated on 24.xii., Christmas Eve, rather than 25.xii., Christmas Day – and not really with the sort of gigantic meal that’s traditional here in the UK. While I’m personally rather partial to turkey, spuds, chipolatas and especially cranberry sauce, there’s a lot to be said for the continental alternatives of Glühwein, Lebkuchen, salmon, bigos, roast goose and potato salad…

By way of some festive cheer, and in celebration of the abject failure of the Copenhagen summit to do anything other than show how weak the influence of Europe and the USA has become on the international stage, here’s something I found on Samizdata: a ‘hypocrisy offset’ that underlines just how wasteful the journeys were of all those climate enthusiasts who were turned back at the gates of the conference…

Frohe Weihnachten, Joyeux Noël, Wesołych Świąt, Vrolijk kerstfeest, Veselé vánoce, メリークリスマス, С Рождеством … and a happy New Year!

Doesn’t work like that…

Courtesy of James Delingpole, it appears that the next battle in the war between those who lend credence to the climate change hypothesis and those who do not has just begun. The Russians have produced a paper (linked document is in Russian, for those of a pan-European persuasion) that essentially quantifies the way in which the disgraced CRU scientists manipulated Siberian data to serve their ideological rather than investigative purposes.

Now, I remain resoundingly sceptical of both sides of the climate change debate (although, in the eyes of ‘true believers’, this automatically makes me as bad as a – ridiculously – so-called ‘climate sceptic’). My basic problem is that the theory of anthropogenic glocal warming (AGW to the blogosphere) rests on less original research and consequently a much narrower group of data sets than other scientific or economic theories (such as the various Phillips curves plotting the  inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment, for example, or the developments of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity). Moreover, this data is at best weakly conclusive and then only through the use of controversial interpretation methods, and as such suffers from a decided lack of the sort of academic and pragmatic rigour that characterises research into the other major fields today (curing cancer, AIDS &c).

On the other hand, the arguments from the ’sceptic’ camp have the fundamental flaw that they are effectively trying to prove a negative – a difficult practice at the best of times. Instead of trying to prove that, for example, the earth is cooling rather than warming, the doubters are essentially left to fight over the extent to which their opponents’ data is inconclusive. So more often than not, many overcompensate by adopting rhetoric that is just as blinkered as that of the most ardent green lobbyists, which seriously impairs the ability of either side to engage in rational debate on the issue.

But all this is really just a prelude to the main point of the article, which (despite its wording) is much more a serious point of inquiry than some smirking excuse for triumphalism. The BBC informs us that southern England is due a bout of heavy snowfall, which would be pretty much the first time since 1994 or 1995 that December has brought snow to any part of the UK south of Scotland. My question is thus: Why, if the planet as a whole is supposed to be warming, should any part of it (especially one as relatively cold in global terms) buck the trend and be cooling as a result of the same climatic processes? All the explanations I have been given so far effectively amount to the sentiment expressed by the manager in the following Nationwide commercial:

I really would be interested in seeing a well-argued explanation (complete with technical terms, not just soundbites) for this phenomenon, because the two I have currently (‘believers’: “oh don’t worry your little head about it, leave that to the SCIENTISTS”; ’sceptics’: “you see, YOU SEE, they’re wrong, it’s a conspiracy”) just don’t cut it as far as I’m concerned…

UPDATE: [H/T to Alex C-D] The NY Times has an interesting bit on how the current cold spell is pretty much entirely attributable to the La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific. It’s a start, I agree – but two things still bother me. El Niño and La Niña have long been observed but never, as far as I can tell, properly explained – so using them as a variable in the great climate equation strikes me as somewhat presumptuous. Also, the piece mentions ‘long-term mean’ temperatures several times, which the NASA literature I was linked to state as being constructed using the data recorded since records began in 1961. This, I think, is the climate lobby’s greatest problem – scientists have less than 50 years’ worth of vaguely reliable data, which may be enough to extrapolate a mini-trend for a few decades, but not really suitable for any longer-term predictions. Basically, we just can’t be sure – and I am certainly not a betting man where the planet is concerned.

Magdalen goes Harry Potter

+++ Apologies for the lack of blogging this month: there are busy times, there are less busy times, and I’ve had the former for the last few weeks +++

Yes, that’s right, my Oxford college’s JCR has finished off the 2009 committee session with a set of light-hearted motions in the final General Meeting of the term, faithfully minuted by me in my function as outgoing JCR Secretary, one of which involved the renaming of the JCR to ‘Gryffindor’ from the Harry Potter books and films, as well as the equivalent renaming of Christchurch College to ‘Slytherin’, Merton to ‘Ravenclaw’ and St Hugh’s to ‘Hufflepuff’.

The Cherwell (Oxford’s independent student newspaper) broke the news first, followed by the Telegraph and now the BBC. It really is going national! I wonder how long it is until (a) it gets brought up in PMQs or (b) someone from Warner Brothers complains that we’re in breach of copyright…

Just to clarify: the motion is only, and can only ever have been, a bit of humour to lighten up the end of a JCR session in which a lot of serious and unwieldy constitutional reforms were pushed through. To actually rename the JCR we would have to rename Magdalen College itself – and the fellows almost certainly wouldn’t allow that, however amusing it would be. The copyright issues would only be the first of a whole host of obstacles that would prevent this gentle whimsy from becoming legal, binding reality.

Grumpiness is good

Apparently, being a grumpy git could help you make better long-term decisions where you, your life, your friends and whatever else you might care about are concerned – so at least claims Prof Joe Forgas, a researcher from the University of New South Wales. Seemingly, a “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style”. Grumpiness for the win!

1902 slaps

Though the site has now been taken down, slapnickgriffin.co.uk, as featured on Guido Fawkes, provided an amazing amount of procrastination potential yesterday. I myself managed a modest 1902 slaps, one for each of the Polish servicemen killed fighting for the UK in WW2 – who under BNP specifications would have been roundly expelled from the UK and left to the mercy of continental fascism… It would appear that 22 million slaps’ worth of people agreed with me…

Charity vs masochism

I’m all in favour of altruistic acts of charitable donation, but it appears that some wealthy Germans have gone a step further and requested that the German government impose a 5pc wealth tax on them for two years in order to raise revenue to bring the country out of recession. I am pretty much at a loss to understand why these individuals, if they have oodles of money lying around that they have no need for, do not raise their charitable giving to social or religious foundations (of which Germany has a fair few), but instead assume that the government has a better idea than they themelves do of where the money should be spent.

To be fair, the idea smacks slightly of a publicity stunt, or at best a symbolic vote of confidence in the new centre-right coalition government – but even so, I am incredulous at how readily these wealthy Germans are prepared to give up elements of their economic liberty. That they expect the revenue raised by the notional 5pc tax to pay for anything other than politicians’ expenses and bureaucratic salaries is frankly laughable. And in economic terms, they have some seriously weird preferences if a smaller endowment is on a superior indifference curve to a larger one… but then, this is presumably the sort of case that the phrase ‘more money than sense’ was invented for…

A spot of libertarianism

Devil’s Kitchen has just concocted a post, referencing others posted by his other half Bella Gerens, and by the left-libertarian Unity, which altogether pretty much sum up what I like about libertarianism. The realisation that the only sphere over which anyone has, or should have, influence is the self; the belief that everyone has the same basic rights unless they forfeit them by attempting to transgress beyond their legitimate sphere of influence; and the acceptance that needs, desires and wants (broadly speaking, conceptions of the good) are unique to each individual and should be left to individuals to realise through own effort and negotiation, with the implication that there is no such thing as objective societal good, merely a whole lot of individual views that may or may not agree with each other.

All in all, very entertaining reading.

In focus: the power of social media

You will probably have become aware of the recent incident on the Tube at Holborn station, where a London Underground worker wholly overreacted to a customer’s complaint at having gotten his arm trapped in a closing train door. The entrepreneur and blogger Jonathan Macdonald, who managed to catch the latter part of the exchange on his cameraphone, was instantly catapulted to social media fame in the wake of the MSM’s latching onto his story, and has posted a very thoughtful follow-up piece about whether social media is altering the balance (arguably a democratic deficit) between journalists and ordinary people in terms of making, reporting and interpreting the news.

Leaving aside the rampaging elephant in the room – namely the fact that TfL find it logically consistent and somehow justified to ratchet up fare prices at the same time as tolerating behaviour as foul as that of this employee – the speed with which the story went from anecdotal afternoon incident to all over the evening news shows just how ferociously fast information travels nowadays. As Mr Macdonald points out, the multiple prongs of Facebook, Twitter and direct contact with the MSM meant that researchers were scouring Google and the blogosphere within less than an hour of the blogpost going up – perhaps most pleasingly, this means that the MSM themselves have realised that it is not Reuters or Bloomberg who produce news, nor even the pretty pictures to go with it, but usually ordinary people operating entirely on their own.

So in celebration of the growing democratisation and, I suppose, privatisation (as opposed to corporatisation) of current affairs, here’s the YouTube video of the incident for you to savour:

Statwatch #25

I am no longer ill with swine flu. So I thought I’d celebrate by doing a Statwatch. Commodities have had a clean sweep of doing well, as have equities, with the Dow briefly nipping above 10000 points during the last week. The recovery in the interbank lending rates has been supported by some surges in IRS rates, while euro has sustained its strength of recent weeks, reaching 94p against sterling on Monday after news of Gordon Brown’s plans to sell off £16bn of government assets in a bid to pay off the considerable budget deficit, before dropping back to 91p by the end of the week. All in all an exciting week…

Markets summary:

£/€ XR: 0.9108 (-0.0033 from last fortnight)

$/£ XR: 1.6355 (+0.0359)

€/$ XR: 0.6709 (-0.0130)

FTSE 100: 5190.24 (+196.86)

Dax: 5743.39 (+271.05)

Nikkei 225: 10257.56 (+583.07)

Dow Jones: 9995.91 (+508.24)

S&P 500: 1087.68 (+62.47)

SONIA: 0.45pc (+0.01)

EONIA: 0.34pc (0.00)

Fed Funds: 0.13pc (+0.02)

£ Libor 3m: 0.57250pc (+0.03125)

€ Euribor 3m: 0.74pc (-0.01)

US$ Libor 3m: 0.28406pc (0.00000)

Interest-rate swaps:

€ 2yr: 1.84pc (+0.15)

€ 5yr: 2.79pc (+0.11)

€ 10yr: 3.53pc (+0.09)

£ 2yr: 1.87pc (+0.09)

£ 5yr: 3.25pc (+0.08)

£ 10yr: 3.92pc (+0.11)

$ 2yr: 1.32pc (+0.08)

$ 5yr: 2.73pc (+0.17)

$ 10yr: 3.61pc (+0.24)

Commodities:

Brent crude oil: $77.14 (+$9.39)

Heating oil: $2.03 (+$0.25)

Natural gas: $4.79 (+$0.11)

Ethanol: $1.79 (+$0.04)

Gold: $1054.00 (+$47.00)

Silver: 1749 (+116)

Copper: 283.80 (+13.80)

Platinum: $1354.00 (+$66.00)

Palladium: $332.90 (+$32.15)

Cocoa: £2119.00 (+£134.00)

Coffee (Robusta): $1460.00 (+$68.00)

Coffee (Arabica): $142.85 (+$11.45)

Corn: 372.00 (+38.50)

No Statwatch this week

Because I unfortunately seem to have acquired piggy flu. Normal service will resume when I’ve nursed myself back to health.

Are the MSM caving in?

Well well! An article on the BBC that doesn’t wibble on about how we’re all going to die of nonexistent anthropogenic global warming. Turns out that solar energy may be responsible for everything in the atmosphere after all. But then the people who actually research the data behind the AGW scare rather than just parroting it or (worse) using it as bases for their own models knew that all along. Maybe the BBC are getting scared that the population will want the license fee cut if they keep up the eco-propaganda? Who knows…

In focus: the Eigenharp

In lieu of proper political blogging, since I have university exams crowding out my life till tomorrow afternoon, here is an article I found in what should be called the ‘Weird and Wonderful‘ section of the BBC website: it concerns a recently-invented instrument, the Eigenharp, which looks like a cross between a space-age guitar-synthesiser and a bassoon. Basically it can turn any relatively competent musician into a one-man orchestra. Kitschy? Perhaps, but I think not after seeing how sophisticatedly it works. Will it replace conventional instruments? At £4000 a pop I suspect not, particularly as it is still only a cool-looking digital instrument with only imitation timbres. Will someone write a concerto for Eigenharp, recorded by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle, which will be played at a Proms concert between Martinu’s 3rd symphony and Nancarrow’s Contraption #1 for computer-driven player-piano? Almost certainly.

In any case, here’s a video demonstrating the uses of the Eigenharp:

more about “BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Do you dru…“, posted with vodpod

Statwatch #24

MASSIVE NEWS: 3-month Euribor and dollar Libor ROSE this week after over 3 months of consecutive week-on-week falls, possibly indicating that banks are starting to take to heart warnings by governmental bodies that not enough credit is being made available, probably as a result of the gradual return of aggressive bargaining to the markets for the first time since 2007. IRS yield curves flattened slightly, as downbeat economic figures depressed long-term growth prospects, and a mix of worse-than-expected reports all over the world dragged down indices, with FTSE and Nikkei dipping below 5000 and 10000 respectively for the first time in weeks. Gold and crude tracked a mixed week for commodities, with the milestone of $70/barrel slightly out of reach, though gold reasserted itself above $1000.

Markets summary:

£/€ XR: 0.9141 (-0.0061 from last week)

$/£ XR: 1.5996 (+0.0057)

€/$ XR: 0.6839 (+0.0032)

FTSE 100: 4993.38 (-88.82)

Dax: 5472.34 (-109.07)

Nikkei 225: 9674.49 (-591.49)

Dow Jones: 9487.67 (-177.52)

S&P 500: 1025.21 (-19.17)

SONIA: 0.44pc (+0.01)

EONIA: 0.34pc (-0.01)

Fed Funds: 0.11pc (-0.03)

£ Libor 3m: 0.54125pc (-0.01000)

€ Euribor 3m: 0.75pc (+0.01)

US$ Libor 3m: 0.28406pc (+0.00156)

Interest-rate swaps:

€ 2yr: 1.69pc (+0.03)

€ 5yr: 2.68pc (-0.07)

€ 10yr: 3.44pc (-0.09)

£ 2yr: 1.78pc (-0.06)

£ 5yr: 3.17pc (-0.17)

£ 10yr: 3.81pc (-0.18)

$ 2yr: 1.24pc (0.00)

$ 5yr: 2.56pc (-0.14)

$ 10yr: 3.37pc (-0.20)

Commodities:

Brent crude oil: $67.75 (+$2.60)

Heating oil: $1.78 (+$0.07)

Natural gas: $4.68 (+$0.72)

Ethanol: $1.75 (+$0.12)

Gold: $1007.00 (+$15.40)

Silver: 1634 (+27)

Copper: 270.00 (-3.45)

Platinum: $1288.00 (-$6.00)

Palladium: $300.75 (+$3.35)

Cocoa: £1985.00 (-£50.00)

Coffee (Robusta): $1392.00 (-$8.00)

Coffee (Arabica): $131.40 (+$3.70)

Corn: 333.50 (-0.50)