Welcome to Episode 2. Twatters have been rife today, but these were my top 5: EUObserver, the European Commission, Richard Branson, US Middle East policy, and Dan Hannan.
You can always rely on the EU for clarity in all matters macro-economic; so while this tweet is hilarious, it isn’t especially surprising.
Let’s see now, what might one call the bedrock data likely to suggest health or otherwise in an economy? The depth of seagull droppings on the main promenade? The amount of paperless paper trails created by virtual bureaucrats? How many gold medals the EU won in Brazil?
Call me wacky, but along with bank lending liquidity, trade figures and currency rating, I’d certainly have manufacturing and employment in my top 5. Come to think of it, they’d probably be No’s 1 & 2.
But nihil desperandum Troikanauts, because we’ve scaled a 7-month high in activity. Keep us posted, eurozone.
Perhaps one day soon, emblazoned across the ECB tower in Frankfurt, we shall see a new eurozone motto, Failed States are Us. Greece is already in the bag, Italy is a case in basket, and Spain is circling while it awaits a place at the arrivals terminal.
But there remains the knotty question of why Schäuble persuaded Papendreou to suggest a greater depth of fiscal doodoo for Greece in 2009 than was really the case. The Greek ELSTAT President on duty at the time is now embroiled in a trial trying to show that the employee who pointed out the Papandreou lies was herself lying, albeit with no known motive for so doing.
Clearly not a big fan of the sub judice principle, the EC has intervened to declare El Presidente innocent before the jury has had a chance to think about it.
Such are the democratic, rule-of-law abiding ways of the EU we just voted to leave, although based on the UK’s progress to date on even approaching the exit door, you wouldn’t think so.
I must declare an interest in Dick Branson: my general view of this Knight of our Septic Realm has always been that he is a bit of a wide-boy.
“Sir” Richard Branson is trying to tell us in this tweet that Jeremy Corbyn sat on the floor of his Virgin train despite there being empty seats. The empty seats all have reserved tickets on them, but Dickbran has built a career based on public gullibility, so why change a winning formula?
Branners wants us to believe that Virgin trains are rarely overcrowded. That is demonstrable bollocks.
He wants us to believe that seven other witnesses are all lying. That in turn demonstrates his respect for Virgin customers.
And he wants us to believe that he has no agenda, given he owns Virgin – and Corbyn wants to renationalise the rail industry.
He also wants us to rerun the Brexit referendum because he lost. Constitutionally and democratically, that too is bollocks.
But then if, where your brain should be there is only Dick, chances are there will be bollocks where your mouth should be.
Meanwhile, the dispatch below shows once again the boring consistency of US military policy in the Middle East. Having (since the risibly entitled Arab Spring) adopted every freedom-fighting murderous group from Egypt to Syria via Libya, that will o’ the wisp American loyalty continues on its cunning path of both confusing its enemies, while amassing more enemies with every turn of the coat:
I’m afraid I have now reach the point that, were a new Arab Spring ever to emerge, the locals would spend the next four hundred years arguing about who owned it. The one and only thing that unites all Arabs is a hatred of the US. As an act of unification, that is one amazing feat.
And finally, from the man who gave you “Let’s get fracking!” comes this beaut…
Young Hannan remains the fortune cookie come to life: his bites always sound good, but they leave a chap hungry for something rather more solid. Now Dan the Man wants to persuade us that free trade is the ultimate tool for human advancement. You have to give the bloke credit for one thing: his arguments are never knowingly undersold.
Free trade with China, for example, has proved to be the fast lane to near bankruptcy for everyone from Newscorp to Google. Free trade on a global scale, meanwhile, has brought us closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever before. Free trade between banks has made Earth, quite possibly, the most indebted planet in our nebula.
Free trade between Third World countries and the Major Powers has reduced most of them to near-complete dependence on the lending rates a decisively indecisive US Fed decides upon, assuming that it will ever decide about anything. And free trade in labour has brought about a remarkably consistent 30% drop in real Western incomes since 1995.
If this is how Dan Hannan measures human advancement, then he is either a fluffy Oxymoron who’s never had a proper job, or a profoundly nasty agent of globalist Mammon.
The jury, as they say, is out.
The Slog 