UK jobs - let's do the math

The chief secretary to the treasury has just announced that they plan to reduce government spending by 38 billion pounds per year, by 2014. Let's assume that each government job corresponds to a spend of £35,000 (admittedly a bit of a wild guess). Now 38,000,000,000 divided by 35,000 is 1,085,714 or approximately one million. That's one heck of a lot of jobs to be found elsewhere in the economy!

Mickanomics, the book!

Just in case you were wondering why I've been so quiet recently. The answer is that I've decided to compile my thoughts about economics in to a book. I have decided that perhaps a blog is not really the right format for my ideas. The problem with a blog is that people only ever want to read the most recent entries and I don't think my later posts make a lot of sense unless you start reading form the beginning. Also I think that the discipline of writing a book is a good way to check that my ideas are consistent.

If anyone would like to check out the chapters I have written so far and give me some feedback on errors/style/clarity etc. please just drop me an email to reissgo(at)gmail.com

This is scary as hell...

On the 2010 food crisis. It seems that all the economists that I have any respect for are universally predicting Armageddon of some sort coming soon. The imbalances in the world economy are currently so huge and are absolutely not being corrected. Something is almost certain to go kaboom (a Minsky moment?) in the not too distant future but its rather tricky to figure out exactly what will be the trigger. An upcoming food crisis could just do the trick.

Nauseating video...

In the light of my recent posts about why the banking sector is far too big, I suggest this man should be be fired (perhaps out of a cannon).

"The banking sector employs 1.3 million people"... What a waste of manpower!

Great explanation of how deregulation and fraud contributed to the crisis.

Pensions madness

Just saw this article on the BBC news website - business section. It stated that 39% of UK household wealth was in "pensions assets". This is crazy. The entire concept of "pensions assets" is absurd and unnecessary, read all the way to the end of this article if you need convincing of that.

Of course the banks are making a massive sums from "managing" this 39% of our wealth.

Steve Keen being interviewed on the Keiser Report.

If only all economics programs were this intelligent...

The interview starts about twelve and a half minutes in to the film.