Wasn’t really picking winners of course. More like ‘oh my loan is now a share I guess I got landed with a loser well let’s spin the hell out of it anyway and see if the share is ever worth any £.’
Even a govt that was acting in good faith would be in a tricky situation here. Duty to be open, accountable, honest, may conflict with its financial interests, and interests in cooperating with the other shareholders that follow from that.
If they announced 'mea culpa, we have been stuck with these random basket case companies that we loaned money to, which can't be repaid now, hoping that if we got money out the door fast we'd do much more good than harm and maybe that's still true' they might sink them.
Anyway if HMT want part time staff to go to some cool board meetings, I will def apply.
As @Wikisteff comments in replies, the next set of questions will be 'why these companies?' 'who benefited?' 'what were there relationships with government or government supporters?
The difficulty of answering these questions [and as we have seen from @JolyonMaugham led investigations into covid procurement, the possibility that there are bad answers to them] is one of the reasons for avoiding govt subsidy/investment policies in normal times.
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Wonder if authors of pieces like @iainmartin1's 'no longer the party of business' think that the Tories would be the party of business if they imposed the agreed controls on imports sharpish, or if they'd be the party of business if they perpetually postponed doing so.
If I was at the covid Press Conference on the winter plan, I'd ask this. If we are, as supposed, at an inflexion point, say roughly holding cases constant.... all the things coming are working to push up on cases. Schools. Universities. Returning to work. Seasonal factors..
...seasonality pushing up on NHS demand, shrinking the number of cases we want [because it increases the chance of having to triage and kill more covid patients], waning immunity.
Pushing down, we have booster jabs for old codgers, 1 jab for 12-15s. Is that enough to counter these other things?
Tl;dr: there are hardly any papers on climate economics in the top journals. A lot of the research that is done is rubbish.
Comment: I too have not published any papers on climate change. But the flip side of this is that I also haven't published any rubbish papers on climate change.
Progressive political agendas in Norway are always in the shadow of an enormous sovereign wealth fund got by extracting the stuff that has warmed the planet. [Not wishing to elevate ourselves here. I'm sure we would have exracted more if there was more on our side of the water.'
idk if this is the right way to think of it, but what would be the counterfactual value of that fund if there had been optimal extraction of the oil everywhere, and the ideal carbon tax applied back in the 70s?
Obvs we were not so sure about global warming then, and the oil market has been manipulated strategically by Saudi+OPEC, and US/Russia, on and off. But. I bet it the cf value would be a lot lower.
Sometimes it's hard to parse the interventions in the debate about whether inflation is transitory or not.
The Fed and other central banks, if they are left to do their job, can make inflation transitory if they want to.
So people saying 'I am team transitory' are saying 'I think the Fed are going to do what it takes to stop the current rise bedding down into a permanent increase in inflation.' You have to put very high probability on extreme circumstances not to believe this IMO.
@mrjamesob Here's a letter we organized from economics academics. It wasn't all right. In some ways we were making less dramatic claims than turned out. thetimes.co.uk/article/econom…
@mrjamesob I don't know if it was the believability of the analysis of leaving that was the problem.
The institutions [BoE/NIESR/HMT/OECD] explaining the costs of Brexit were successfully labelled as toadies of the govt and liberal establishment...
@mrjamesob Independent academics like ourselves struggled to get coverage, particulary on broadcast media. Economists4Brexit were better organized, more professsional and their exposure created the impression there was a balance of arguments and economists for and against.