At the Shanghai postal museum, where I concluded that a Foucauldian history of imperialist postal administration would practically write itself. Standardisation=cheap surveillance=multiple handles for power to shape behaviour.

Communists clip coupons too.

Clip those coupons!

Visiting the Securities Museum in Shanghai today, where one can reflect on different national styles in giving commemorative gifts.

What you learn about leverage if you take one of my classes. Tooth=equity, and as you all know the Hellboy 2 tooth fairy destroys the rest of you as well as taking your tooth.

Competing headlines in China Daily this morning.

Inspired by Keynes, a classroom exercise.

My instinct—nothing more—is that this is an effort to push a decision: Andy, you can’t afford to disappoint the markets now that they think it’s hers… FT pages have been used for this sort of thing before.

There is a reason the Klein-Pettis boom is called Trade Wars are class wars. The Pettis view on global imbalances is that if Chinese and German workers consumed a higher share of output they’d have smaller net exports. They‘re explicit on tariffs not working for this and praise Biden for not using.

Two unrelated stories on the gold market from today’s FT.

The Crits were relentlessly hounded for their supposed legal nihilism and cynicism on judicial decision-making, but the Roberts court makes them seem like dewy-eyed naïfs.

Whoever this “Green Party strategist“ advocating against exercising what could be substantial leverage in the Burnham by-election is, they are completely inadequate to the moment. The is so far beyond ridiculous in so many ways I can’t even begin to enumerate them.

The FT this morning unironically suggests Labour should promote ‘the unleashing of animal spirits in the economy’. Great to see Keynes invoked 90 years on but does their edition have some edits?

Local Tory MP sends out a flyer on a green background with no mention of her party affiliation or her obsessive anti-trans campaigning. A sign of the times?

It’s a beautiful day to go leafleting with the dog. @eastsurreygreens.bsky.social

The non-bizarre logic is gilt yields are driven in large part by Bank Rate, which BoE may raise in reaction to rising energy prices w/ gilt yields up too. Sure, maybe BoE won't react that way. But hard to make the case that energy subsidies were key to Truss-'era' yields. @zackpolanski.bsky.social

Not that it's the most important thing going on right now, but it continues to be outrageous that the BoE has its own gilt issue policy, for no good reason. It's still selling gilts of 30-yrs+ maturity, whereas the DMO has now stopped entirely.

Dear @lseblogs.bsky.social -- In light of this contribution, is there any chance we could switch to a template that doesn't give an option to share our blogs on X, and does give an option to share them on Bluesky?

One of the things I like about your very clear post is that it expresses the significance of the payment of interest on reserves as a monetary policy tool as well as a fiscal issue in a way that only intermittently reaches the public discourse. And the subsidy to the banks it involves is huge.

Because the Treasury is liable for interest on the bank reserves, which is charged at Bank Rate, they amount to floating rate loan (which replace low-coupon fixed rate debt bought with the reserves under QE). So having a lot of bank reserves when Bank Rate went up has proved exceedingly expensive.

Bloomberg taking a shot across the bow of @zackpolanski.bsky.social — but should we listen to an economist (and Times columnist btw) whose main concern regarding Reform is its fiscal policy? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

This gives context to this proposal, which would significantly improve progressively.

TIL that employee contributions to UK national insurance are ludicrously regressive: rate goes down from 8% to 2% on income > £50,270. And it's getting even worse: threshold is infrequently updated & would be nearly £10000 higher if adjusted for post-Covid inflation.

Over the last 11 financial years, the UK Treasury has spent more on paying interest to the banking sector on their reserves than it has taken in from them in corporate and sector-specific taxes. In 2024-25, it paid over 3 times as much for interest on reserves as it received from taxes on banks.

An outstanding policy analysis, but should be made more general: *any* business that has a return on equity < 10% automatically gets a tax adjustment so it reaches that level. Also, the magic of the market requires businesses have absolute freedom on salaries and bonuses.

Some Threadneedle-ologists say BoE will hold rates this week and wait to see how budget looks. To act on this reasoning would contradict long-stated, albeit entirely arbitrary, policy, which implies implausibly assuming government makes no change.

In case you don’t speak central banker, here’s BoE chief economist Huw Pill saying QT should be a club to force austerity on govt. Nary a reference to a BoE mandate in the speech! www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2025/...

The official line from the BoE on this is that the pace at which their portfolio would shrink if all gilts were held to maturity would be too slow. What counts as fast enough has never been specified. So far about 2/3s of QT has been from maturing gilts.