Utopia, you are standing in it!

I obviously haven’t seen, or read, the best advice expert commentators have been providing to their wholesale market clients over the last 24 hours but in what I have heard and read I’ve been struck by how little attention seems to have been paid in the more popular/accessible part of the market to this from the MPC’s statement (emphasis added). Looking at some of the changes in market prices, it isn’t clear how much weight markets have put on it.

Below, by contrast, are the “bias statements” (comments about what might happen next) from the OCR decisions back to August 2021. Yesterday’s statement – for all the gung-ho 50 basis point move – ends on a very different note. They seem genuinely open minded on whether the next move might be up or down, and whether any such move might be soon or far away. The MPC are no better…

Now that was a boring title wasn’t it?

There was a mistake in Monday’s post about the Reserve Bank’s MPC external member Caroline Saunders’ term (and I am grateful to Brad Olsen of Infometrics, on Twitter, for pointing me back in the right direction).

Saunders’ 4 year term, from 1 April 2019, expired last Friday. She is eligible to be appointed for one more term (the law sensibly limits external members to no more than two four-year terms) but she has not, it appears, been reappointed (by contrast, the other two externals were reappointed when their first terms expired this time last year).

As I noted in Monday’s post, the Minister of Finance has the ability to extend the term of an MPC member (each of the clauses referred to here are from Schedule 3 of the Reserve Bank Act)

Any such extension to a first term sensibly counts against…

For over 700 years London was the scene of public executions, a practice which wove itself into the city’s history and popular culture. This excellent and imaginatively designed exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands explores all aspects of public executions in London, using a combination of artifacts, letters, informative videos, songs and voices, paintings, engravings and caricatures, and some really gruesome exhibits.

Above all, it is amazingly comprehensive – it touches on all the aspects of the subject I’d expected beforehand but goes on to explore all kinds of nooks and crannies I’d never have thought of. I’d never thought about the effort some condemned prisoners put into being well dressed for their trip to the gallows. Well, the exhibition tells the stories of condemned men and women who went to great lengths to look their best on their death day, and even has the fine dress and fancy…

On any reckoning, wind power is an abject failure. Dilute and diffuse, chaotically intermittent, insanely costly (when backup costs are included) and a wholesale environmental disaster, wiping out millions of birds, bats and beneficial bugs, and wrecking the livability the rural communities, nothing stacks up apart from the massive and endless subsidies upon which the whole fiasco depends.

A report from an Oxford scientist, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison dumps a bucket on the wind industry and its wild claims about powering the world and saving the planet, as Naveen Athrappully reports below.

‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math
Epoch Times
Naveen Athrappully
27 March 2023

Wind power has been historically and scientifically unreliable, claims an Oxford University mathematician and physicist, with his calculations revealing the government to be pursuing a “bluster of windfarm politics” while discarding numerical evidence.

After the decision to cut…

The Reserve Bank of Australia yesterday left its policy rate unchanged at 3.6 per cent. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s MPC is generally expected to today raise its OCR by another 25 basis points to 5 per cent.

In the broad sweep of decades it isn’t an unusually large gap. Most of the time, New Zealand short-term nominal interest rates are at least a bit higher than those in Australia (Australia’s inflation target is a little lower than New Zealand so the real interest differential tends to be a bit larger).

Sometimes economic circumstances in the two countries are very different. Thus, that period a decade or so ago when the RBA cash rate was higher than the RBNZ OCR coincided with the later stages of the Australian mining investment boom, for which there was nothing comparable in New Zealand.

But over the last two or three years, the…

Just as Europe reverses course on its wind and solar-powered energy calamity, in Australia, the lunatics in charge of the asylum are determined to double down and destroy what remains of this country’s once reliable and affordable power supplies.

With policies directed at wiping reliable coal-fired power plants off the map and rewarding the unreliables with even more subsidies, soft loans and mandated targets, Australians might well wonder where their next watt might be coming from, and how on Earth they will afford to pay for power when their bills rocket once again – in July retail prices are set to jump by 20-30% depending on the state you’re in [Note to Ed: a state of poverty, most likely].

Peta Credlin poses that very question with Terry McCrann in this Sky News interview.

‘Mad rush’ to renewable energy is ‘Total Insanity’: Terry McCrann
Sky News
Terry McCrann and Peta Credlin

Napoleon Bonaparte (August 15, 1769 – May 5, 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a Corsica-born French military commander and political leader who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led successful campaigns during the Revolutionary Wars.

He was the de facto leader of the French Republic as First Consul from 1799 to 1804, then Emperor of the French from 1804 until 1814 and again in 1815. Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy endures to this day, as a highly celebrated and controversial leader. He initiated many liberal reforms that have persisted in society, and is considered one of the greatest military commanders in history. His campaigns are still studied at military academies worldwide. Between three and six million civilians and soldiers died in what became known as the Napoleonic Wars.

War of the Sixth Coalition

Napoleon assumed command in Germany and inflicted a series of…

Edward the Confessor (c. 1003 – January 5, 1066) was an Anglo-Saxon King of the English. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 to 1066.

Edward was the seventh son of Æthelred the Unready, and the first by his second wife, Emma of Normandy, daughter of the Norman Duke Richard the Fearless and Gunnora (c. 950 – c. 1031). The names of Gunnor’s parents are unknown, but Robert of Torigni wrote that her father was a forester from the Pays de Caux and according to Dudo of Saint-Quentin she was of noble Danish ancestry.

Edward was born between 1003 and 1005 in Islip, Oxfordshire, and is first recorded as a ‘witness’ to two charters in 1005. He had one full brother, Alfred, and a sister, Godgifu. In charters he was always listed behind his older half-brothers, showing that he ranked beneath them.

During his childhood…

I was recently in a discussion about the title of “King Consort” and how rare of a position it is. Generally, I have considered King Felipe II of Spain as the only King Consort of England and Ireland but upon further reflection I have begun to rethink his position as King of England.

If Felipe II wasn’t a King Consort then what type of King was he? What was his position?

First let’s define what a King Consort is. We know a Queen Consort is the wife of a reigning King, a King Regnant if you will. Regnant is an adjective meaning to reign or to rule. A Consort is the spouse of a reigning monarch.

Therefore, a King Consort, is a rarely used title to describe the husband of a Queen Regnant.

Whether a Queen Consort or a King Consort the role implies that the holder of such position…

It is so much simpler to interpret the UK economy if you attribute every single problem to Brexit. But it is also wrong.

Last week, for example, the EU statistics agency Eurostat released preliminary data suggesting that consumer price inflation in the euro area fell from 8.5pc in February to ‘just’ 6.9pc in March, including a drop from 9.3pc to 7.8pc in Germany. The pain in Spain may already be over, with inflation there expected to be a balmy 3.1pc.

In contrast, the UK consumer price (CPI) measure rose to 10.4pc in February. The March data (out on 19 April) will probably still be around 10pc. Cue the predictable cries of ‘it was Brexit wot done it!’, from all the usual suspects.

However, even the briefest of glances below the hood tells a very different story. The gap between inflation in the UK and in the rest of Europe can…

By Paul Homewood

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/06/12/greenland-temperatures-2021/

Every year I publish the latest Greenland temperature data from the DMI. Unfortunately they have not got round to updating it for 2021.

The data is of course extremely damning for the alarmist narrative about rising temperatures in the Arctic and Greenland meltdowns, as it shows that Greenland was just as warm in the 1930s to 50s as it has been in the last two decades, with the exception of that one warm year in 2010.

Maybe that is the reason for the withholding of the data for the last two years.

However we can still access the up to date numbers from GISS:

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v4_globe/

GISS publish both the unadjusted (ie actual) temperatures as well as their homogenised ones, which are used in their global temperature dataset.

The actual data follows the same trend as DMI, with temperatures as high around the 1930s and 40s. (The…

Germany’s self-inflicted renewable energy disaster is on display for all to see. It’s a calamity that the MSM refuses to acknowledge. An inconvenient truth, no doubt.

Sure, the Russians pulled the plug on gas supplies to Germany, but mother nature does the same with sunshine and breezes, every day. Sunset, cloud cover and calm weather, do it every time.

The Germans call it ‘dunkelflaute’ – a period of gloomy, windless weather. Which roughly translates as a complete collapse in the output of their more than 30,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels.

Quietly, logic and common sense are returning to retake control of Germany’s idiotic energy policy, with coal-fired power front and centre.

As Pierre Gosselin outlines below, Germans appear less keen on pointless virtue signalling and more in tune with the need to have power 24 x 7, whatever the weather.

Wall Street Journal Makes Fun Of German…

Politicians routinely crabwalk away from policy disasters. So it is in Britain where ever-reliable nuclear power has just been declared ‘green’ and essential to Britain’s energy future.

Oversold and overhyped, in Europe, wind power now barely rates a mention amongst anyone serious about serious energy policy. Like that awkward, always-drunk uncle that everyone wants to avoid and forget.

What a difference ever-rocketing power prices and an increasingly chaotic and insufficient weather-driven supply makes to policies driven by ideology rather than engineering.

No longer able to avoid the unavoidable, Britain’s government is backing nuclear power like their entire economic future depends upon it. Which, incidentally, it very much does.

World Nuclear News has the news.

UK to class nuclear as environmentally sustainable
World Nuclear News
Press Release
15 March 2023

The UK’s Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has announced that nuclear will “subject to consultation, be classed as environmentally sustainable in our green…