This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1

1. Military Intelligence Contact Update: He is confirming Mr. X’s sources, Bruce’s sources, MarkZ’s sources that this week will be a week of release “fireworks” finally; he has the same info as Dr. Charlie Ward’s, Simon Parkes,’ & Robert David Steele’s sources saying that the...

Charles Walker, Vice Chair of the 1922 Tory backbench committee in the Commons tells TWTW that he thinks the government knew it intended to “cancel” Christmas on Wednesday or Thursday but waited for Parliament to rise to do it. Says many of his colleagues find this “egregious.”

When put to Walker that Matt Hancock said this morning that wasn’t the case, it was the briefing on Friday which prompted the decision, Walker says: “Hmm yeah...well I’d have to disagree with the SoS on that.” So he’s either saying Hancock isn’t being truthful or is misinformed.

Walker: “Surely at some stage a senior government minister has say I’ve offered my resignation to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister has to say- very early I’ve had to accept this.”

Reminder- Charles Walker is Vice Chair of the Tory backbench committee.

Walker heavily implies it’s Matt Hancock he wants to see resign: “I’m not asking for the government to collapse. I’m asking for a Secretary of State to take some responsibility.”

The Charles Walker interview is extraordinary in what he is inferring. A senior Conservative MP is essentially accusing his govt and ministers of deceit about what they knew about the new strain and when and by implication the timing of the new lockdown.

Lodestone - Wikipedia

Pieces of lodestone, suspended so they could turn, were the first magnetic compasses,[3][4][5][6] and their importance to early navigation is indicated by the name lodestone, which in Middle English means "course stone" or "leading

1/9

While debt-to-GDP ratios already have a limited but very misunderstood use, it seems economists are finding bright new ways of misunderstanding them. Now we say that when nominal interest rates are lower than nominal growth rates, the

2/9

downward pressure on the debt-to-GDP ratio makes rising government debt and larger government deficits more sustainable and more easily justified.

This is totally confused. When the nominal interest rate is lower than the nominal GDP growth rate, it only means that net...

3/9

borrowers are getting a disproportionate share of growth relative to net lenders. This in and of itself changes the comparability of the debt-to-GDP ratio, so the fact that the ratio may decline tells us nothing about its sustainability which, I'm glad to say, isn't...

4/9

a mistake Olivier Blanchard makes in this article.

At least three things matter. First, whether or not rising debt is sustainable depends almost wholly on underlying conditions in the real economy, and only trivially on the arithmetical relationship between...

5/9

the interest rate and the growth rate. Second, this approach simply assumes away financial distress costs, in which case debt capacity is infinite anyway and the interest rate becomes irrelevant. And third, it assumes that the nominal debt level matters independently...