Utopia, you are standing in it!

After writing previous post, the RenewEconomy article kept going through my mind. The author of the article suggested that the response of the Hornsdale Power Reserve to a tripping coal fired power unit was extraordinary, when in reality it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I wondered why on earth the author was so lyrical about what was in fact a poor performance…

Then it suddenly struck me. It might well be a misinterpretation of how the event was represented.

Let me explain.

There were two graphs presented in the article. The first one is the frequency versus the response of the Hornsdale Power Unit and it stood central in previous post. There is however a second graph in the article and it is this graph that could easily lend itself to misinterpretation. It shows the sharp decline of the tripped coal unit combined with the response of…

Who’d have thought the Treasury’s ‘Ways and Means’ facility at the Bank of England could cause so much excitement? The two parties have agreed a temporary extension of what is, in effect, the government’s overdraft account with the central bank. Cue great delight from advocates of printing money to pay for higher public spending, such as Positive Money, and equal displeasure from opponents. In reality, both reactions are overdone.

For a start, the ‘Ways and Means’ (W&M) facility is nothing new. Usually the balance on this account is less than £400 million (peanuts in this context). But the government did make more use of it during the global financial crisis in 2008, when the balance hit its previous record high of just under £20 billion. The UK has therefore been here before, so a precedent has already been set.

What’s more, this is still only short-term borrowing that…

Parliament can do anything – except replace the House of Lords? For over a century, replacing the House of Lords has brooked no delay. Now, at last, the Government seems tempted to dam the brook, by substituting an elected Senate for the old Second Chamber. At first glance, this is constitutionally straightforward. Whatever Parliament enacts is law – so surely an Act of Parliament can lawfully replace the House of Lords? But such an Act may be open to challenge.

Traditionally, parliamentary sovereignty admits of one exception – ‘Parliament cannot … bind its successors by the terms of any statute‘ (Alpheus Todd, Parliamentary Government in the British Colonies (Boston, 1880), p.192). To use the technical jargon, Parliament has continuing sovereignty, which it cannot limit. A successful challenge, then, could only be mounted if (1) parliamentary sovereignty is continuing, and (2) replacing the House of Lords violates continuing sovereignty…

Daniel Baksa, Zsuzsa Munkacsi and Carolin Nerlich in this research:

Europe’s population is ageing, and this trend is expected to continue over the coming decades. The demographic changes are captured by the change in the old-age dependency ratio, which measures the size of the elderly population – defined as people aged 65 years and older – in relation to the working-age population – aged 15-64. According to Eurostat, between now and 2070 the ratio for the euro area will rise strongly from 30% to 52%, with considerable differences across countries. Two-thirds of this increase will be concentrated in the next decade and a half, as the large “baby boom” generation born 1955-70 will be over 65, while life expectancy will keep rising and the fertility rate will remain low or fall even further.

Ageing societies are facing major macroeconomic challenges. Labour forces are shrinking and precautionary savings are likely increasing, while…

NZ First leader Winston Peters today said he wants the election held on November 21,  Radio  NZ   reported.  He says he believes  the health system would be under the pump in September with the winter flu season and the country potentially still dealing with the impacts of Covid-19.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the September election date before the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Peters said he had fought for the November date originally, because his party believed summer elections were better, but given the pressures of Covid-19 he will again raise delaying it by two months.

“Having a good look at it now and with the compounding problems of coronavirus and all the distractions and efforts going in elsewhere, perhaps the sound thing is to say November 21 is the right date and we should go ahead then,” he said.

Our Reserve Bank has been all over the place on monetary policy going back to last year.

There was the totally out-of-the-blue 50 basis point OCR cut last year.  It may or may not have been substantively justified, but they never had a compelling rationale at the time and were reduced to dreaming up (quite reasonable) stories after the event.    The concern about minimising the risk of falling expectations was one of those stories –  good, but clearly an ex post rationalisation (since all the contemporary statements made little or no mention of the issue).

In the wake of that cut, the Governor gave quite a few interviews.  One of the most substantial was with Newsroom’s Bernard Hickey (there is a full transcript at the link).   In that interview – barely eight months ago –  we learned that the Governor had no particular qualms about a negative OCR…

Governor General Lord Aberdeen

Introduction  

On 8 July 1896, Governor General Lord Aberdeen forced Prime Minister Sir Charles Tupper from office by refusing to promulgate his constitutional advice and sign off on Orders-in-Council to summon senators and make other appointments. Tupper sought to fill up vacancies knowing full well that the Liberals had just won a parliamentary majority for the first time since 1874 in the general election held on 23 June 1896. When Aberdeen refused to sign the Orders-in-Council, Tupper wrote back that he had no choice but to resign the premiership, because the prime minister cannot remain in office after a governor general has rejected his constitutional advice and withdrawn his confidence from him. Lord Aberdeen then appointed Sir Wilfrid Laurier as Prime Minister, and Laurier would stand astride Canadian politics like a colossus for the next fifteen years. At Tupper’s insistence and at Aberdeen’s acquiescence, their written…

The latest blog for the Georgian Lords considers the topical issue of quarantine. In the 1720s the government was forced to update its quarantine legislation, but as Dr Charles Littleton of our Lords 1715-1790 project shows, it received spirited opposition from members of the House of Lords...

In the face of pressure from opposition parties and its own back-benchers, the Johnson government substantially amended the recently-passed Coronavirus Act (2020) enabling Parliament to scrutinize and renew the bill every six months. This was not the first time Parliament has tried to modify the power of the executive in the face of a national emergency. In earlier centuries the great fear was an even more indiscriminate killer, bubonic plague. London in particular had suffered from outbreaks of ‘the plague’ throughout the 17th century, the most famous being the Great Plague of 1665. The question of quarantine, of enforcing an involuntary 40-day…

COVID-19 has spread its share of misery, made all the worse by the doomsday cult that cry ‘apocalypse’ at every challenge humanity faces. This is the same class of character who, barely weeks ago, were dressing up like goblins and gluing themselves to the roads in order to save us from, you guessed it, the apocalypse. Except the looming doom predicted by those pasty-faced hysterics was all about changes in the weather.

Those with sufficient memory will recall that the world was being urged, in pretty strident terms, to destroy our energy supplies, and with it our way of living, by throwing everything at chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

As every good self-interested panic merchant well-knows, it pays to have a (very profitable) non-solution to a never-ending, non-problem.

Keep complaining about the weather (dressed up as the portents of doom) and the subsidies to wind and solar would just keep…

This was almost inevitable, and my first thought is, “Will his supporters vote for Biden, or will they stay home?” If the latter, we’re screwed come November. Oh, and will Sanders endorse Biden? I suspect so.

Click on the screenshot to read the CNN report:

And discuss below if you wish.

UPDATE:  Here’s an article that’s no longer relevant, since it argues that Bernie should drop his candidacy because he appeals to only one of three factions of Democrats, according to a division proposed not by Edsall, but by Shom Mazumder, a political scientist at Harvard,:

An excerpt:

On 25 March, the UK passed the Coronavirus Act 2020 as part of its attempt to manage the coronavirus outbreak. The Act introduces a wave of temporary measures designed to either amend existing legislative provisions or introduce new statutory powers in order to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 (See Nicholas Clapham’s Conversation post here on the content of Bill). As countries around the world enact similar laws, there are notable concerns regarding not only the impact of emergency provisions on human rights, but also the potential of emergency powers to become normalised. One response is to utilise sunset clauses. This piece argues that while sunset clauses are both welcome and necessary, they should nevertheless be approached with a degree of caution.

Legislation in times of emergency

Following agreement by both Houses of Parliament, the Coronavirus Bill received Royal Assent on 25 March transposing the Bill into primary legislation in…

My last two articles have highlighted the failures of risk management in the ten weeks leading up to the Western COVID-19 lockdowns where over-reliance on the precautionary principle has left our authorities with limited options leading to a massive denial of social benefits with unfathomable consequences. I want to turn to a more detailed assessment of how risk managers failed with the hope that, once COVID-19 becomes part of history, we will have learnt something. While the horrors of the devastation is still raw, we need to prepare a blueprint for tomorrow. This first section looks at how the precautionary principle failed to function as a credible risk management tool. Part 2 will look at how we can become risk resilient even when our risk managers fail us (how we can perform a “Docilian Detox”). Part 3 will lay down the groundwork for a robust risk management strategy post-COVID-19 to…

The High Court of Australia, in a unanimous verdict of a 7-member bench, has acquitted Cardinal George Pell of the charges of child sexual abuse for which he has been serving time in prison: see Pell v The Queen[2020] HCA 12 (7 April 2020). He was immediately released.