Tag Archives: culture

Bank of England Fails

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The Bank of England, in its panic over the British bond market repricing, is extending its intervention into that market. The purpose of the BOE’s intervention, though, is exposed by the beneficiaries of the move [emphasis added].

The central bank on Tuesday said it would add inflation-linked government bonds to its program of bond purchases after a fresh attempt on Monday to help pension funds failed to calm markets.

And [emphasis added]

The central bank first launched its bond purchases on September 28 in an effort to help pension funds that held large positions in derivative-based investments that were upended by the surge in UK government bond yields.

Clearly, the BOE is not in the business of maintaining a stable pound; it’s in the business of protecting special interests from the results of their foolishness—like “investing” pensioners’ and future pensioners’ money in risky vehicles like those derivatives.

The proper move would be for the BOE to stand aside and let the market do what it will—which is to say let the market investors, all of them buyers and sellers according to their own imperatives, do what they will according to their own, independently arrived at, imperatives. That will be painful during the (re)adjustment period, but the outcome will be what investors, with their pounds, say they want.

After all, a properly free and open market is self correcting; a government intervened-in market never can be. Aside from the fact that a centrally directed market cannot respond quickly enough, those interventions color those investors’ imperatives, driving them necessarily away from independent development. Such politically-created market distortions permanently block corrections from running to completion.

Catch-22?

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No, typical Leftist “misunderstanding.”

In a piece about the possibility of an inflation-related increase in Social Security payments, Megan Henney, writing for FOXBusiness, cited this remark from Mary Johnson, The Senior Citizens League‘s Policy Analyst/Editor, about the supposed downside of the increase.

Higher Social Security payments are a bit of a Catch-22. They can reduce eligibility for low-income safety net programs, like food stamps….

That demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of safety net programs. With greater income, there’s less need for the safety net, so of course eligibility should be reduced commensurately.

Only a Leftist, who believes in ever-growing government, could say such a thing with a straight face.

Visit the Border?

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Nah. The border tsar was too busy noshing with mega-donors in Texas to take the time to go to the border and see with her own eyes the disaster the Biden-Harris administrating is inflicting on us. She has people to do that, with their eyes. Except, no, she doesn’t….

She did, though, spend her busy time speechifying.

Harris [joined] a conversation at the LBJ Presidential Library on Saturday to discuss abortion access, then [gave] a speech at a fundraiser for the Texas Democratic Party.

The LBJ library, in Austin, is just about 200 miles from the Rio Grande River, a bare 3 hours, more or less, by auto and even quicker via Marine Two. But it’s too much trouble for the woman appointed by President Joe Biden (D) to the responsibility of dealing with our border to spend half a day there, on the river, seeing the illegal aliens walking/wading across that border, illegal aliens that Biden, through his Press Secretary, yokked it up (skip ahead to 1:50) over the very idea that anyone walked/waded across.

A Method of Identifying Acceptable Views

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Thursday Notable & Quotable contains an excerpt from a Times Literary Supplement piece in which the piece’s writer recounted a classroom incident in which he had touted a free market society and the instructor had written on his paper, “Are you Margaret Thatcher?” and left the paper ungraded. The classroom boy was mortified.

[T]he comparison shocked me into a more thoughtful politics and provided an early lesson: if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view.

And

That doesn’t mean that every person with [fill in that disagreeable person’s identity] views endorses those links, but some soul-searching is surely called for.

Of course. It isn’t the merits of the message that’s important; rather, it’s the merits of the person carrying that message.

This is what has passed for teaching our children for too many years.

Rent Control Fails Again

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And so does the St Paul, MN, city council, sort of.

Last November, the city’s voters passed a rent control law that caps annual rent increases at 3%. Then reality intruded, and the City Council was forced to attempt corrective actions.

The City Council noted in its reform bill that, “according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there have been only two hundred (200) residential building permits in Saint Paul through April of 2022, compared to 1,391 at the same point in 2021.”

That drop occurred as immediately as any economic reality can—beginning just two months after the cap was passed.

The City Council’s corrective actions are limited to

  • a 20-year rent-control exemption for new residential properties and some apartments that participate in government affordable-housing programs
  • after a tenant leaves or is evicted with just cause, landlords will be able to raise rent by 8% plus inflation
  • property owners can…apply to St Paul for an exemption to the 3% rent cap if their property taxes go up or if there are “unavoidable increases” in maintenance and operating costs, including increases owing to inflation

In truth, this may be all the City Council can do to…modify…the will of the city’s residents. To get serious correction to this rent control fiasco, the question really needs to be resubmitted to those residents.

If those voters reaffirm their position on rent control, we’ll all know what those worthies truly think about housing and access to it by those in the lower economic tiers of the city.