"Hello, IT? My economy has stopped working."

"Have you tried -"

"Yes."

"Okay. Check settings. What does it say under software?"

"Compatible with EU membership."

"Do you have that?"

"I just uninstalled it."

"Er - Why?"

"Honestly, I can't remember. Something about fish?"

As some will have noted, there were a lot of reports yesterday on the fact that £50 billion of banks notes are missing in the UK economy. This got me thinking. And as a result I have to suggest that finding that £50 billion of cash would not be hard. Here’s how to do it.

As the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has noted, around £50 billion of banknotes in issue have no explained use. In other words, they do not appear to be used for regular cash transactions. What their alternative use might be is not known.

Some could be in the possession of tourists, who have not bothered to exchange them on leaving the country. But the amounts involved would be small.

A bigger sum might be cash savings under the proverbial mattress. This is entirely plausible. It is possible that some of this will be related to benefit fraud: the amount of savings a person has can have a significant impact on their ability to claim a number of benefits.

There is no doubt that a significant part of this money Is used within the shadow economy. That can cover activity where tax is evaded, of course. But it also includes drug dealing and many forms of human trafficking and abuse.

One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.

1/

It turns out that there are DISeconomies of scale, what Brandeis called "the curse of bigness" and really, the Universal-NBC-Comcast octopus is a poster child for that

Comcast has just informed its subscribers that they are at risk of losing access to "Bravo, CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Olympic Channel, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo, Universal Kids, NBC Universo, USA Network and NBC Sports

That is, Comcast has warned its customers that Comcast might not license its channels to Comcast anymore.

This is a "carriage dispute" - a dispute over how much the cable operator will pay the broadcaster. It's a common dispute to have.

4/

But in this case, Comcast's dispute is over the accounting fiction of how much one division of a vertical monopolist will nominally charge another to access its products.

5/

1/ 2017 vs 2020 Economics

Whatever the many reasons for the coup. The aftermath has been an economic disaster. This is instructive, since Mugabe was a monumental failure in Economics.

I wish to stick to economic facts &figures. I restrict myself exclusively to GOZ & RBZ stats

2/
To be fair to Mnangagwa, as President he is fed a lot of misinformation & politically convenient gibberish by those closest to him & security clusters bent on personal enrichment than national well being.

I say this, because some of the issues are too simple to understand.

3/
Mnangagwa can never commit harakiri ( Japanese suicide by cutting one’s belly) if facts & figures were honestly presented to him. Yet we saw Mugabe commit harakiri. He died a sad death while his lieutenants are now in power. Where the lieutenants honest to Mugabe...

4/
Chinamasa was Mugabe’s finance Minister. Was he frank & honest? If so why would he benefit from Mugabe’s ouster? The same is true of Mugabe’s bureaucracy. Most benefitted from the coup. So we ask if they were honest with him during his reign?

ED suffers the same problem

5/
On Wallstreet, CEO’s are not protected from their critics & independent research. Often they rely entirely on this research & seek it out in developing their strategy.

Once, Patterson Timba kicked out an analyst from his investor briefing. Forgetting strategy is in critique

Originally posted Jan 5th - https://t.co/Vim3JlOtlZ

FULTON CO.

We're looking at "book votes." That is, people who are marked as having voted in the voter rolls. This is how Floyd County was detected - you had an excess of voters in the book vs. what was recorded on machines.

Jan 5th I mapped the book votes visually at a precinct level and found curious correlations that bears public scrutiny.

Screencaps are not from a public site, but underlying data given is real, public, and verifiable.

We'll be taking a precinct-by-precinct look at Fulton county excess votes. Excess meaning more recorded votes than book.

Fulton has 10K+ excess votes. This has been blamed on stale record keeping. At a precinct level, there are 14700 "excess" votes and 3900 "missing" votes.

This is a precinct map of Fulton County. There'll be a lot of data, so refer to these maps over and over until you understand. Here, the red and yellow/orange areas are where the most excess votes are (by ratio).

And for background context - this is a map showing where Trump votes are. This is a *relative* coloring not an absolute coloring (otherwise it'd be all blue). Fulton is strongly Democratic so the red areas are actually like 55% Trump at best whereas the blue areas are <5% Trump.

1/16

It is a little frustrating to see the response many analysts had to the GDP growth data Chinese released today. These numbers aren’t especially good, and they certainly shouldn’t have been surprising. Back in April and May, when most

2/16

were projecting negative or barely positive GDP growth for China in 2020 (the OECD, for example, expected China’s GDP to contract by 3.7%), I insisted that GDP growth for 2020 would be positive, and probably between 2% and 3%.

Today, it was reported as 2.3%. How did...

3/16

I know? Because I knew that while most of the healthy sources of Chinese growth would contract (except for exports, which would expand given Beijing’s intense supply-side response to the impact of Covid-19), Beijing was going to respond to a significant...

4/16

worsening of the healthy parts of its economy by unleashing enough of the unhealthy, non-productive growth it has long tried to constrain – basically real estate and infrastructure investment – in order to achieve as much economic activity as it...

5/16

needed for domestic political ends.

And that’s exactly what happened. While GDP grew by 6.5% in the fourth quarter, even with substantial tailwinds its retail sales measure – a proxy for consumption – was only up 4.6%, and it was down 3.9% overall in 2020.