🧵THE STRANGE CASE OF THE ONE MILLION POUND FINE
The story of an obscure press release on an obscure website which begs intriguing questions about Britain's "unprecedentedly tough" sanctions regime & why perhaps it's not quite as tough as it looks.
You may find it unsettling
👇 Back in Aug 2023, HMRC published this notice in the bowels of its website. Don't worry if it doesn't ring a bell - it didn't get any publicity.
But it's a big deal. A £1m fine for breaking Russian sanctions rules.
The single biggest fine in relation to trade sanctions.

🇨🇳I was rather hoping to be writing this from China, where the Chancellor has just landed for the most significant economic mission in ages - restarting Britain's formal economic relationship with China.
Alas I'm still in London.
But make no mistake; this visit is a BIG deal.
🧵 Why?
Because this is the first such trip since 2017.
UK econ relations with China have been getting frostier for 6 yrs or more.
Huawei have been thrown out; rules imposed on Chinese businesspeople; accusations of spying.
& around the world nations are imposing tariffs on China.

🔥GAS PRICES🔥
Why are they on the rise again?
Why is Europe (and the UK) deindustrialising at a rapid pace?
Why have we failed (contrary to the conventional wisdom) to increase the amount of non-Russian gas in our system?
Lots of questions. Some answers in my five min primer 👇 This is a big deal - and not widely understood:
The volume of non-Russian gas in the European system is FLAT vs before the Ukraine war.
That's not the conventional wisdom.
Back in 2022 many assumed imported LNG would help make up the lost gas from Russia.
That didn't happen...

🌾 VERTICAL FARMING🌾
Could it save the world?
I used to be sceptical. There are MANY challenges.
But then I visited one. & I'm no longer so sure.
So with the world facing future food crises here's a thread on the most interesting thing to happen to farming in a long time...
🧵 Let's start with a chart.
A few weeks ago I did a deep data dive into the state of farming in the UK.
It culminated with a v long-run chart suggesting our ability to grow ever more crops in a given hectare is slowing. Possibly stalling.
This is a really big deal

https://twitter.com/edconwaysky/status/1867833054959743271

If you're interested in energy/climate you've probably heard the nugget that "kerosene/crude oil helped save the whales", by reducing demand for whale oil in lanterns.
I've even trotted it out myself🤦‍♂️
But there's a problem with it. A BIG problem...
🧵 The backstory here begins 200 years ago, before the age of crude oil & electricity, when the best way to light a room was a lantern, and the best oil to burn in that lantern was oil from a sperm whale.
It burnt brighter and with less smoke or stink than other oils

If you're even half interested in energy, I bet you've seen this chart. I call it The Most Hopeful Chart in the World.
The point? We're embracing renewable power MUCH faster than expected.
Hurrah!
Only problem is, this chart has an evil twin. A chart we really need to discuss
🧵 The Most Hopeful Chart in the World shows how each year the @IEA predicted that the amount of solar output around the world would plateau or rise v slowly in the following years. But instead solar output defied all expectations, rising exponentially.
That's great news.

🚜FARMAGEDDON🌾
The story of what's REALLY going on in farming. A story far more complex than the conventional wisdom.
This isn't just (or even mainly) about inheritance tax. It's about a cascade of challenges & crises that may ultimately threaten food security.
📽️5 min primer👇 Let's begin with that big, overarching issue: food security.
For most of the past century, farmers have been encouraged to grow as much food as possible. The story here goes back to WWII and its aftermath, when the conventional wisdom was the UK needed to be more self sufficient

🚗What's happening to Europe's car industry is one of the biggest stories in the world right now, & prob the biggest story of next year too.
A slow motion implosion driven by multiple factors (esp Chinese competition).
Watch my primer on what's going on👇
What makes this moment so dangerous, so destructive for legacy carmakers, is that this is a perfect storm. Three main issues:
1. The shift from conventional engines to batteries is a DISRUPTIVE innovation. The kind of thing Clay Christensen wrote about.
This is a MASSIVE deal...

Today we learnt the no of people flowing into the UK hit an all-time high last yr: an influx we've NEVER seen before either as a total or as a share of the population.
So... why is the @ONS (and some news organisations) reporting this as a FALL in migration?!
Let's dig deeper
🧵 The ONS publishes immigration figures every six months. There's a lot of data, with plenty of provisos all over it.
But as is often the case the story gets simplified in the telling.
Consider the story the last time the data came out. This is how the chart looked 👇

🧵SALT🧵
It's been snowing in the UK and the road gritters are out in force, begging the question:
Have you ever wondered where that grit actually COMES from?
The answer is more magical, beautiful and fascinating than you probably realised.
1/14 Because that dirty-looking salt being spread by trucks on our roads is actually the remains of an ancient ocean (actually two ancient oceans), buried deep beneath our feet.
Most of the stuff being spread in London comes from a single mine in Cheshire - at Winsford.
2/14

🧵How worried should we (and @RachelReevesMP) be about the slightly nervy reaction from financial markets towards her first Budget?
Short answer: certainly a bit worried.
But perhaps not for the reasons you might expect...

https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1851898454785552805

Worth saying at the outset: these markets are volatile.
Trying to interpret movements in govt bonds is v tricky.
They're moved by all sorts of factors - fiscal, monetary, economic and structural - from all over the world.
So yesterday's Budget is only one of many factors here...

🚨Latest UK population numbers just landed.
Two headlines:
- The UK natural population (eg domestic births minus deaths) is now FALLING - at the fastest rate in modern history.
- Yet OVERALL population is rising at the fastest rate since 1948 🤯
How? Lemme explain...
🧵 Nearly every year since records began a century and a bit ago, more people in the UK were born than died.
In the year to 2023, that changed.
664k births. 681k deaths.
The net drop of 16k is the biggest on record (also in % terms).
It's a watershed moment for UK demographics.

🚨This is the story of how UK & EU goods are STILL going into Russia in vast quantities, despite sanctions.
Of how the economic war waged by the G7 is failing.
Of how I witnessed sanctions rules broken in plain sight.
But above all else it’s the story of a chart... 🧵 Here’s the chart in question. It shows you UK car exports to Russia.
And there’s a clear story here.
Look: when Russia invaded Ukraine, the UK (and for that matter most of the G7) imposed sanctions on Russia. So exports of cars to Russia stopped.
End of story, right?

🧵Here’s the extraordinary story of a Frenchman who came up with an invention that changed the world, before events took a twist.
It’s a rollercoaster story that just might help us solve one of the biggest challenges facing humanity.
Sounds far-fetched, I know, but read on… The man in question was Nicolas Leblanc.
Born in 1742, he trained as a doctor but was always short of cash. He became the physician to Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans - a minor French royal. Like many enlightened intellectuals, his hobby was scientific experimentation.

🧵Want to understand why weaning ourselves off fossil fuels like oil is such a tricky challenge?
Best place to start is with this ubiquitous toy👇
This is a thread about what I call the LEGO conundrum.
It begins when you ponder what a LEGO brick is actually made of... Standard Lego bricks are made of something called Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene.
ABS is a tough thermoplastic you often find in the handles of scissors or the frames of hard carry-on baggage cases.
But Lego bricks are prob the most iconic application.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonit…

🧵
It might look like something from space, but some folks think lumps of rock like this could help us solve one of the biggest problems facing the planet.
Others fear they could trigger ecological catastrophe.
Presenting the weird, unsettling story of polymetallic nodules These potato-sized mineral lumps form over millions of yrs on the ocean floor as metals accrete around organic fragments.
Up until 150 years ago no-one knew polymetallic nodules even existed. Today they're a very big deal.
So. Here are the 2 main things you need to know abt them

🧵
80 years ago today, newspapers in Europe carried news of the unexpected death of a very important man, in a hotel miles from the nearest city.
A man who, said some, was helping the Allies win the war.
But there was a twist to the tale. The man in question wasn't actually dead That man was John Maynard Keynes. The 61 year old economist was at the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire for what became known as the Bretton Woods conference. And the day earlier he had indeed collapsed, following a heart attack. It was a moment of high drama.

It says something about how confusing Labour's green investment policies are that seemingly even the Treasury has misunderstood them.
Contrary to what the picture in this press release👇 suggests, the National Wealth Fund has nothing to do with wind power or indeed green energy

https://twitter.com/hmtreasury/status/1810674259452190951

Instead it's very specifically designed to focus on all the low or zero carbon technologies that AREN'T really to do with generating power.
- Green steel
- Hydrogen
- Clusters
- Gigafactories
Here's the sectors the institution will focus on 👇

🧵
How did Keir Starmer manage to win a landslide majority even though fewer people voted for him than for Jeremy Corbyn in either of his election bids?
A quick thread looking beneath the numbers.
Let’s start with swing… Election nerds like to focus on two-party swing - essentially showing how voters shifted between the main parties.
And on this metric, Labour enjoyed a MASSIVE swing. 11%. Slightly more than Blair in 1997.
But there’s more to this chart than meets the eye…

🧵THE STRANGE CASE OF THE YAKOV GAKKEL🧵
A thread about the energy story no-one wants to talk about.
About how UK companies are helping facilitate Russia, as it earns money to finance its war.
And about how the cost of living crisis didn't end quite how you prob thought it did… But before all of that it's a story of a ship. A v unusual ship.
The Yakov Gakkel. A vessel that routinely passes these shores. As I type this it's somewhere north of Norway. But I first saw it in the English Channel.
And at first glance you might not think it all that special..

🧵You know the idea, posited by @theIFS, that the main parties are engaged in a "conspiracy of silence" this election.
Their original point was about spending plans.
But I think you cld go much further.
I can think of at least 5 other areas where there's a conspiracy of silence 1⃣Taxes ARE going up under all the main parties' plans.
But they prefer not to talk about this, hiding instead behind the claim that tax rates on income tax, NICs and VAT won't rise. But they've still signed up to plans which will mean the AMOUNT of taxes we're paying will rise.