Duncan Weldon
@DuncanWeldon
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Economist, broadcaster & writer. Author of 200 Years of Muddling Through. Economics, history, other stuff.
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Joined September 2009
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It’s paperback publication day. Get it from your preferred bookseller via this link:
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Cancelling Xmas 6 days before Xmas because you couldn’t face the pain of cancelling Xmas 10 days before Xmas.
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I’ve been following U.K. budgets for 20 years or so.
I have often profoundly disagreed with the decisions made. But I’ve always at least - sort of - understood the logic behind them.
Today is a new for me. I genuinely don’t understand the decision making process.
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Ironic that it will be Oxford University that finally allows the country to drop its obsession with PPE.
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They. Have. Not. Deliberately. Crashed. Sterling. To. Help. Hedge. Funds.
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A trade war with your largest trading partner is not a good idea. A trade war with your largest trading partner when growth is already slowing and inflation is high is possibly the stupidest economic policy suggestion I’ve ever encountered.
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Tremendous. The second person to receive the Oxford vaccine has managed to causally mention that he went to Oxford when being interviewed about it.
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So, I think Labour conference just voted to give the Lib Dems about 1.5 million votes. Very generous of them.
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I’m really not sure this is the best use of council resources.
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I genuinely don’t understand the journey from Thatcherite true believer in markets to advocate of North Korean style self sufficiency that some Conservatives seem to have taken. It’s astonishing.
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If Barry became PM then every Wednesday we could have Gardiner’s Question Time.
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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a negative reaction to a budget across the media and economic wonk-land.
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Really don’t see why tonight’s statement wasn’t made in Parliament and followed by immediate questions.
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I feel the British government needs to adjust to what is happening.
This isn’t a slow burning economic crisis like Brexit. It’s an acute one.
Sending out ministers to do media rounds denying any responsibility for the problem makes it actively worse.
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I am aware of the butterfly effect. But if you’d told me on January 1st that by mid March I’d be covering a potential global recession from my living room because of something a bat did in Wuhan, I’m not sure I’d have believed you.
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Brexit sector reports are the gift that keeps on giving. Superb analysis.
"Electricity is a fundamental part of modern society. Residential and industrial users rely on its use to ensure basic and vital needs such as lighting, heating or refrigeration are met on a daily basis"
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Ironically enough I’ve bought this but have no idea what it contains.
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The weirdest memory hole in popular British history is the fact we mostly just forget the *successful* Dutch invasion of 1688.
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When I worked at the BBC I always wondered whether it was a bit over staffed. Does it really, I asked myself, take this many staff to make smooth television without technical hitches and distractions?
Well, guess I have an answer now.
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The Malthouse Compromise. The Grieve Amendment. The Backstop. The Salzburg Summit. The Implementation Period.
Brexit is basically a never ending series of bad airport spy thriller titles.
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Today’s unpopular opinion: this is only a hell-site if you choose to experience it as such.
It’s actually *super-useful* and full of helpful people.
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British politics & economic policy is remarkably straightforward right now: Either the government will pay this bill or it won’t.
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It has just occurred to me that there is a non-trivial chance that Johnson will have shorter term as PM than May. That would be, to be fair, objectively hilarious.
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This really is the best chart I’ve seen in years. So much in it!
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Irish border is an unexpected problem in the Brexit talks.
Unexpected here used in the sense that it was unexpected that a house guest would be murdered whilst Poirot stayed over for a weekend shooting party.
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This is a really good - and useful - piece.
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If we stopped calling them “free trade deals” and started calling them “regulatory standards agreements” then the world would make more sense.
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This is a very tough watch and a tough read. I’d usually advise caution, but I think sharing it widely and broadcasting it a lot will help make people take social distancing more seriously.
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Hearing that DD was going to resign but assumed he could keep his ministerial car and salary under a bespoke deal which turned out not to be available.
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Some personal news. Josephine Rose Weldon was born, a bit earlier than expected, just after lunch today.
Mother and baby doing well.
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So, the Prime Minister's line is essentially "all of my staff have being lying to me and I was unaware of a party in my own house". Cool.
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Vince Cable is 74. That means by the time of the next general election he could be... 74.
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Lack of Brexit impact assessments is staggering. Just really sinking in for me.
This matters to the economy more than any budget, but imagine if the Chancellor announced a load of tax changes and said “nah, we haven’t modelled this. It’ll be fine”.
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So, just so we are clear... the DUP not backing it means the Prime Minster’s flagship policy is set to fail and therefore she will have no choice but to not resign.
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Brexit/Big Ben repairs both neatly sum up British politics. Non-experts loudly exclaiming, "it'll take *how* long? It can't be *that* hard".
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The Economist Trump interview transcript is, well, amazing.
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The inequality of the virus is already striking.
Much easier for white collar workers to work from home.
Spare rooms for self isolation.
Spare cash to stock pile goods.
Better than statutory sick pay, etc,etc.
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How the potato came to Greece in the late 1820s. This is wonderful.
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As they say... some personal news.
As of next week, I’ll be joining the Economist to write about the British economy.
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Urgh. American cooking websites. Just tell me the ingredients and how to cook it. I don’t need an 800 word essay on memories of your grandmother who used to cook this dish.
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The whole trend of people with a classical statue as their avatar saying “actually, feudalism was alright” is just deeply strange.
Life before the Industrial Revolution for the vast majority of humanity was, in fact, pretty rubbish.
You’re a medieval peasant farmer.
You’re at the bottom rung of society—bound to the land with limited social mobility…
But life isn’t all bad. Here’s what it looks like🧵
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This matters more than the currency volatility.
Goodness. Gilts are getting slammed against a wall. Yields up 20BPS across THE ENTIRE CURVE
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It would be really helpful if people - and the Prime Minister! - could stop saying that household energy bills are now capped at £2,500. They aren’t.
Unit prices & daily fees are capped at such a level so that *the typical household bill* will be £2,500.
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Hang on, does this mean I’ll have to order a “pint” in the pub rather than my usual 568ml?
Boris Johnson is to announce the return of imperial weights and measures, making it legal for market stalls, shops and supermarkets to sell their goods using only Britain’s traditional weighing system post-Brexit
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Just saw the “the rules are changing” advert urging firms to prepare for Jan 1st and Brexit.
It is pretty astonishing that we are 7 business days away from a change and we don’t know what we are changing to.
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IFS on the Tory manifesto: “If a single Budget had contained all these tax and spending proposals we would have been calling it modest. As a blueprint for five years in government the lack of significant policy action is remarkable.”
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Worst NHS crisis of my lifetime, dire economic situation and the public policy discussion today is about a maths teaching plan for the mid to late 2020s which we don’t have the teachers to deliver.
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He might lose, independents usually do. But bloody hell,
@DavidGauke
is having a good campaign.
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Stamp duty is a bad tax. You’d ideally abolish it and replace with a progressive annual property value tax/rebanded council tax. This isn’t controversial.
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WhatsApp nowadays feels much like I imagine WhatsApp would have felt circa 1985 beyond the Iron Curtain.
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If my majority was reliant on a load ex-Labour seats in the north and Midlands I simply would not make jokes about the miners’ strike.
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Bored of the performative questioning of the covid restrictions.
“So I can go to a Xmas party but not the office?”
1. Yes. Would you prefer it was the other way round?
2. Think of a contact budget. We have decided to reduce it. And prioritising social over work contact is fine.
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Test of basic competence.
You are running for Mayor of London. London is subject to restrictions on non-work household mixing. You attend a party. Someone gets a camera out.
Do you?
A/ Tell them to put it away.
B/ Pose for a photograph.
It’s a really tricky one.
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This week I went to what we now have to call “the red wall”.
If you step out of the town centres that have often seen better days, what you find is loads of developments full of home owning families.
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This is your regularly scheduled reminder that energy price shocks are ultimately disinflationary.
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You can’t use “now is the winter of our discontent” to signify “this is a bad time”. It’s chopping the sentence in two. It’s “Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York”.
This is both the most petty hill I will die on. And a battle I have lost.
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The Bank’s problem, as I see it, is that “this core market is so broken we are being forced to intervene to prevent a fire sale” and “we will stop doing that on Friday” does not feel like a coherent and logical position.
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If we end up with something like May’s deal or with a Norway type Brexit then Ireland is going to be one of our most important bilateral diplomatic relationships. The people we need to lobby on our behalf in Brussels.
UK politicians would do well to remember that.
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How did Skype mess up a dominant market position so badly?
When did Zoom become a thing?
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I both feel the need to share my brother-in-law’s Facebook update and I miss living in Ashington.
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I’m 95% confident this is a metaphor. But I can’t be totally sure.
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I reckon that Truss and Kwarteng suffered from a version of the John Peel problem “but everyone we know bought that record! It must be super popular”/“No, you know everyone who bought that record” but with libertarian-adjacent economics rather than albums.
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The answer seems to be: like being in a hotel.
What is it like staying in one of the UK's quarantine hotels?
A couple have filmed the room they'll be confined to for the next 10 days.
More here:
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Genuine mystery to me: I get why people on the left might have been favourable to Moscow when it was the capital of the USSR. I disagree, but I get it.
But today? Just muscle memory? Instinctive anti-Americanism?
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I think people are both overly discounting quite how fast things will be able to return to “normal” next year given the wonderful vaccine news and quite what a disaster the Christmas rules’ relaxation has the potential to be.
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Older people are keen to date younger people.
Who knew?
💥🇬🇧 New.
👫only 33% Remainers wd date Leaver but 47% Leavers wd date Remainer
👫only 35% of Labour voters wd date a Conservative but 49% of Conservatives would date Labour voter
I'm noticing a theme ...🤓🤔
YouGov data, released today
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A Sunday evening thread on the early twentieth century British debate on free trade vs tariffs and why it might be relevant to the Brexit debate.
You can stretch supposed economic parallels until they break. But I want to talk about politics instead.
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Popped into pharmacy and picked up a box of home test LFTs. For free.
Going to be honest with my American friends. Probably wouldn’t trade this for a better clothes dryer.
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Worth stepping back and reflecting on what a disaster this is.
UK car production down -6.0% in September with 63,125 vehicles rolling off factory lines.
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“You’re not as a good as a real teacher”.
“I know. But I try”.
“You’ve had nearly a year to get better”.
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I love how in British politics “knows how to use a spreadsheet” is usually written up as “is basically some sort of wizard”.
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I am not an epidemiologist. But does a lock down to “save Christmas” make any sense?
Surely the strategy isn’t “suppress the virus now and then have a load of household mixing in deepest winter to give it another kickstart”? Surely?
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Thought for the day: anyone surprised that it may be difficult to attract people to move from other jobs to agriculture is probably unfamiliar with, well, the course of human history to date.
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Top trolling of the Labour Party via the means of a Parliamentary amendment.
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Puigdemont hiding in Belgium. Or, as he has taken to calling it, the territory formerly known as the Spanish Netherlands.
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Using the entirely unrepresentative sample of “people I was at school with”. The level of anger over the A-level stuff from usually entirely non-political posters is approaching Barnard Castle levels.
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Seriously:"Europe give me what I want or I'll take hard won rights way from my own people & slash public services" is a pretty bad argument.
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Rarely can my reaction to a chart be summed up with the word “wow”. But wow.
Relative support of left and right leaning parties by education and income in the 1970s and 2010s. Source: Gethin, Martínez-Toledano & Piketty
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The five year old offered to make dessert.
The result: ready salted Pringles and smarties stuck together with white chocolate icing.
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The people I feel sorry for: those who stayed up last night reading all 585 pages...
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Congrats to
@samueltombs
and commiserations to Patrick “Economists for Free Trade” Minford.
(And worth remembering when certain people have a pop at the OBR forecasts and praise Minford’s).
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Under appreciated aspect of today’s immigration reform: the salary thresholds make it easier for firms in the higher wage bits of the country to hire overseas staff. That’s an advantage for firms in the South East over other regions. Hard to square with the levelling up agenda.
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The Red Arrows route tonight. If you like that sort of thing.
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Seeing the Rees-Mogg spread over the benches image pop up a lot over the last few days. Often shared by people who don’t really follow politics. I think it’s cut through, possibly more than anything else this week.
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We’ve got 30 minutes to announce a deal or the Kung Fu Panda marathon is at risk.
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Eldest asks “how many people were on the Death Star?
Google tells me the canon answer is 1.2 million. And now I’m wondering if the celebrations after the battles of Yavin and Endor were in good taste.
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Doing public health crisis comms by off the record Saturday evening briefs to political journalists is an utterly ridiculous way for the government to behave.
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The Labour Party. Deciding what they’d like tomorrow’s coverage to be about.
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Looks like some top investigative work from the Met over the last few weeks. Well done.
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Being absolutely cynical: if I was a Tory MP… I’d probably want Johnson to be around long enough to take the blame for April’s tax hikes/energy price cap rise and be the public face for May’s local election drubbing.
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Hard to pick my favourite line in that video. But it’s probably “this is being recorded”.
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The good people at Radio 4 have commissioned me to make some programmes on the economics of the Second World War.
Should be on late August.
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