Author Archives: Bill le Breton

Bill le Breton

What Japan did while we were sleeping

By Bill le Breton | Fri 5th April 2013 - 8:51 am

"2 x inflation in 2 years, 2 x monetary base, 2 x amount bonds purchased" “2 x inflation in 2 years, 2 x monetary base, 2 x amount bonds purchased”The overnight news yesterday from the Bank of Japan spelt out its serious intent to double the monetary base – the type of monetary easing, a l’outrance, that I have been arguing for at LDV, and elsewhere, for a number of years now.

The announcement followed the declaration back in November by the then leader of Japan’s opposition that when elected he …

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Bill le Breton

No braking at Gambon – a monetary policy guide for petrolheads

By Bill le Breton | Fri 22nd March 2013 - 11:48 am

If you had to choose a person from the following list, and only this list, to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, would you choose James May, Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Hammond? Tough choice, but go on: indulge me!

The last time I wrote here, I predicted that the Quad had reached a turning point on monetary policy. I did this not on the evidence of Vince Cable’s New Statesman article, but on a report in the Financial Times that Osborne was set to change the regime imposed on the Bank of England.

Well, …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: 7th March 2013: The turning point.

By Bill le Breton | Thu 7th March 2013 - 1:26 pm

You will have woken this morning to news that Vince Cable has launched a Plan C or Plan Cable featuring a ‘Keynesian’ stimulus centred around borrowing (at the current low rates that the Government can borrow) to fund infrastructure projects.  But as usual the media is doing the country a grave disservice.

It is an historic day filled with possibility, but to understand the full pregnancy of the position you will need to go beyond the crude headlines of crude Keynsianism and read Cable’s full article When the Facts Change, Should I Change My Mind.

But you will also …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Bullseye banzai

By Bill le Breton | Fri 11th January 2013 - 8:51 am

In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d do my own Mid-Term Review and not keep it secret.

Back on the 14th November 2012, I wrote a piece for LDV on how Shinzo Abe, the clear favourite to become Japan’s next PM, was telling the Bank of Japan to deliver 3% growth in the money measure of GDP (NGDP) on pain of having its independence withdrawn. NGDP in Japan had been virtually static for twenty years – a sort of Great Stagnoflation.

How’s Mr Abe doing just eight weeks on? Well, he’s Prime Minister, he’s told the …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary exploited people

By Bill le Breton | Mon 3rd December 2012 - 5:10 pm

The McCanns, the Dowlers, and the Gurkhas threatened with deportation are ordinary people thrown into exceptional situations, their lives tossed from one side to the other not just by fate but, like ‘cargo’, to be exploited for cash and credit by the powerful and the acquisitive.

Liberal Democrats in general and Nick Clegg in particular have always been at their best when standing shoulder to shoulder with ordinary people against a conniving, power-hoarding Establishment, be that Fleet Street, corrupt local officials, or self serving bureaucracies. That was the message that connected him to a huge audience watching the first …

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Bill le Breton

“Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”*

By Bill le Breton | Fri 23rd November 2012 - 11:21 am

Enough is enough. In the face of soaring national debt, the Liberal Democrat leader has this week called for the Central Bank to be made less independent to pave the way for more aggressive and unlimited monetary easing, a dramatic relaxation of the inflation target accompanied by a major public works programme and a supplementary budget.

Great news! The tragedy is that the Liberal Democrat leader in question is not Nick Clegg speaking on the eve of the Autumn Spending statement, but Shinzo Abe, Leader of the Japanese Liberal Democrats, launching his general election campaign which he is tipped to win. And the reaction of those dreaded markets? Positive – rising 4-5% as other world

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Will Special Branch be knocking on the Old Lady’s door?

By Bill le Breton | Tue 6th November 2012 - 9:09 am

Today three reports have been published into the operations of the Bank of England. None of these pose the killer question: why, when for month after month in 2008 the UK’s Gross Domestic Product in money terms (the NGDP) fell from its stable long term annual growth rate of +5% to -5% a year, did the Monetary Policy Committee stubbornly maintained the Bank’s interest rate at 5%?

This excellent blog by Britmouse details, details the quarterly falls in NGDP and the inertia of the Bank which has the power to set the level of aggregate demand in the economy.

It is …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Mind the gap – a sceptical view of the need for cuts

By Bill le Breton | Sun 21st October 2012 - 9:50 am

The UK’s economic position has deteriorated, government revenues are lower and welfare expenditure higher than anticipated, worsening the deficit so that austerity must continue further into this decade. Because of this deterioration a combination of increased taxes or cuts must be identified in the Autumn Spending Statement in December.

That is the orthodox view. It is based on the generally accepted proposition that the structural deficit should be eliminated. This has set off widespread debate as to whether the increased scale of the structural deficit should be eliminated by increased taxes (such as a Mansion Tax) or expenditure reductions and where these should be identified, with the Conservatives placing welfare cuts at the top of their agenda.

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: An open letter to Ryan Coetzee, Nick Clegg’s new head of strategy

By Bill le Breton | Sun 30th September 2012 - 10:00 am

Dear Ryan,

Congratulations on your new job. Welcome to the ‘family’ of UK Liberal Democrat activists and campaigners. You arrive at a critical moment.

But the Liberal Party and its successors have been here before. In the General Election of 1951 we fielded just 100 candidates and only 6 of these were elected.  In the Euro elections of 1989, the Liberal Democrats polled just 6.2%.

Our revivals in each case – in the Seventies and the Nineties – were built on an emerging development of Liberalism and its expression in a style of campaigning that sought to help people take and use power …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: New World Economics

By Bill le Breton | Sun 16th September 2012 - 9:25 am

Bloomberg flickered on the screen as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, set out his policy before the world’s press:

To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate the Committee agreed today to increase policy accommodation by purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month.

That’s open-ended Quantitative Easing (QE) to you and me; monetary stimulus a l’outrance designed to expand the money base until unemployment drops below 7% or PCE (personal consumption expenditure) core inflation increases above 3%.

In …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Why a referendum on second chamber reform would be good for the party

By Bill le Breton | Fri 13th July 2012 - 11:56 am

The Liberal Democrats built their electoral success on the three ‘Cs’: Concentrate, Communicate and Campaign. The campaigning zeal of the Party took us from a handful of councillors and a few MPs dotted around the Celtic fringe in the mid ‘Seventies to a truly national party, with over 3,500 councillors, 60MPs, power and influence in the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament, power and influence in over 150 councils, from Newcastle to Newquay, Liverpool to Islington.

Campaigning is the life blood of the movement we endeavour to create around the drive to seize and redistribute power. We do this by the simple means of helping people to take and use their power in their communities. Campaigning succeeds by involving people beyond the party in our campaigns. It energies and strengthens communities and nurtures the tolerance that comes from understanding others and identifying the common causes that link us. These common causes centre upon the injustice stemming from subjection to illegitimate power – be that banks that gamble with our money and provide shocking service, supermarkets that drive farmers to ruin and fix prices or bureaucrats who entangle citizens in red tape and restrict people’s opportunities.

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: It’s time for a change in monetary policy

By Bill le Breton | Wed 30th May 2012 - 8:55 am

A few years ago my son got a clock for Christmas. It functions anti-clockwise. One o’clock is on the left of twelve. Five to one is really five past one. Are you with me?

The thing is, you have to change completely the way you read and interpret the data on the clock face.

The Coalition leadership is proud of its management of the economy because it sees the interest rates on gilts historically low and continuing to fall. It reads this as a sign that ‘the markets’ have confidence in its stewardship of UK plc.

But suppose they are reading the clock …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Clutching at straws

By Bill le Breton | Tue 15th May 2012 - 10:08 am

I have spent the day clutching at a couple of straws.

Last week in the tractor factory Nick Clegg appeared to confuse the ‘deficit’ with the National Debt when he said, “We have a moral duty to the next generation to wipe the slate clean for them of debt. We have set out a plan – it lasts about six or seven years – to wipe the slate clean to rid people of the deadweight of debt that has been built up over time.”

It sounded like a fail in GCSE Economics. But suppose he wasn’t mistaking the policy to eliminate the structural deficit by 2017 for a moral crusade to wipe the slate clean by removing the deadweight of the National Debt, all £1,300 billion of it.

At the other end of my straw was the realisation that Nick Clegg might have become an extreme Market Monetarist and was revealing his plan to re-establish Nominal GDP back to its trend line, even if that meant buying in the whole of the National Debt in the mother of all quantitative easing exercises.

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Austerity and defying the Laws of gravity

By Bill le Breton | Wed 9th May 2012 - 10:58 am

“It’s ideology, stupid.” – a subtext to the Queen’s Speech

On Five Live a bond trader says that austerity isn’t working and the government should be more expansionary. In Wake Up to Money a fund manger says that austerity has been overdone and it’s time for countries like Germany and Britain to borrow more.

Yet on Tuesday’s Today programme, David Laws continued to advocate austerity.

It is more and more apparent that ‘economics’ is being used to serve the ideology of a smaller State, damning the idea that the State should have different responsibilities at different times, especially when the private sector is …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Time for women, grey hairs and drastic action

By Bill le Breton | Sun 6th May 2012 - 8:50 am

In an email to members, ALDC’s Tim Pickstone wrote, “Winning elections as a Liberal Democrat is never easy … Winning those elections when you’re also in Government is even harder.”

Well Tim, what you say is true, but if we console ourselves with these thoughts we are doomed to become a party which, like the Saxons of Hereward the Wakes’s time, is holed up in a few isolated corners and crevices of the land, where our flag is carried by an MP and a council group, well resourced, skilled and of sufficient mass to evade destruction, but unable to link up …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Brand values

By Bill le Breton | Tue 20th March 2012 - 10:33 am

There have been a couple of posts recently on where campaigning ideas should come from and whether those campaigns can be directed centrally, first from Scott Hill and then from Robin McGhee And another, which I refuse to link to because it does not appear to publish comments, mocked us for our backwardness in brand management.

Campaigning and not policy is the life blood of Liberal Democrat politics. A policy however right or valuable is inanimate. A campaign establishes connections and energizes movement. That is perhaps why you cannot chose for Liberal Democrats THE campaign they should be waging in March in 2012 or in any other month for that matter. That was the lesson I learnt when an acting Chief Executive of ALDC in the late 1980s.

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Pick your horse in the grand recovery stakes

By Bill le Breton | Thu 16th February 2012 - 4:28 pm

Moody’s, the US credit ratings agency, has put the UK on negative outlook, threatening the country’s triple A status. This came the day after three other organizations had also made their views known.

The CBI predicted that the UK would avoid a double-dip recession, the services firm BDO published the results of a survey suggesting turnovers were continuing to fall and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reported that employers were more likely to lay off staff.

It is now four and a half years since the uncertainty of the credit worthiness of banks and hedge funds that were …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: 29 Days to save the UK

By Bill le Breton | Wed 1st February 2012 - 6:55 pm

We are lucky it is a leap year. It gives us an extra day to save the country.

Here are two graphs, both from the Financial Times. This one shows the UK’s Nominal Gross Domestic Product. It shows the development of the double dip recession we are facing.

The figures are up to October 2011. The next will be published in February, but expect the trend lines to continue ‘south’.

Then, here’s a chart of a measure of the supply of money in the economy. It is a broad …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Agreeing with Nick

By Bill le Breton | Thu 22nd September 2011 - 10:55 am

I agree with Nick. Following the result of the General Election we had to enter a coalition with the Conservatives.

I go further than him, though.

Especially for those who have supported the party for decades, it was the decisive point for which we had long battled.

Every Focus written, every door knocked, every pound raised, every campaign fought led us to that moment, that decision, that responsibility which, thanks to our hard earned votes in the House of Commons, we had been able to seize.

It was always going to be the case that when our moment came …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: How can the community politics approach reform the Coalition?

By Bill le Breton | Thu 2nd June 2011 - 10:25 am

“All change, all change here!” That was the shout of the bus-conductor as we reached the terminus. If only we had realised what a profound philosopher he was. For he is no more, nor is his role, nor the structure of society he inhabited.

Change and how to cope with it is at the heart of every human decision. The conservative wishes to take a measured step based on hard facts taken from experience. The progressive predicts the shape of the future and confidently proposes a radical leap.

By contrast, the community politician, the ideas behind whose activism we have begun …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: So what is this Community Politics all about then?

By Bill le Breton | Wed 1st June 2011 - 10:25 am

Party President, Tim Farron recently published on this site a very well received piece reminding us that we have, close to hand, the greatest opportunity in the history of our party.

He also observed that, “our biggest collective failure recently – from the grassroots to the cabinet – has been that too many Lib Dems have drifted from the sort of community politics that we have prided ourselves on in the past, or else been too busy to practice”.

Community politics is a much misunderstood concept practiced by many as an electoral technique and belittled by others as ‘pavement politics’.

I hope the …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Time for a New Deal

By Bill le Breton | Sat 7th May 2011 - 11:53 am

Looking forward and rejecting recriminations, what the country needs now is a New Deal. What the party needs now, within the Coalition and after the deal-breaking of the last few weeks, is also a new deal.

As might have been expected, the economy is flat lining. The bounce that the optimists thought would spontaneously follow a period of recession has not occurred. We are on the verge of a round of public expenditure cuts that will further depress the economy and destroy the life chances of millions.

The justification for accepting deeper and earlier cuts to public expenditure said more about an …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: And there was no more sea … (Revelations 21:1)

By Bill le Breton | Wed 10th March 2010 - 1:15 pm

Have a look at this cutting I found from the Wall Street Journal, 2nd March:

Market has encountered resistance since hitting new highs Tuesday, natural in view of the sweeping rally up to then. Previous pauses in early Jan. and mid-Feb. were followed by renewed rallying; evidence this is a similar period of consolidation seen in pattern of declining volume on recessions, indicating line of least resistance remains upward.

With the Dow today on 10,500 and the FTSE around 5,500, are we moving onwards and upwards towards a recovery?

Nope! The date line on that cutting was 2nd March 1931. That’s about …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Engage the Enemy more Closely

By Bill le Breton | Thu 25th February 2010 - 10:50 am

Sorry to be militaristic. This is the signal that the Royal Navy used to make it a supreme force in the world two hundred years ago.

What is the one factor that is preventing thousands of electors giving the Tories another turn? It is fear of what they did last time. It is fear of Margaret Thatcher’s impact on unemployment and on essential services.

Cameron’s main objective has been to move this stigma from the brand – cut’s in services, dole queues, the nasty party.

This morning Osborne admitted on the Today Programme that he will …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: The Morning after the Night Before … February 1974

By Bill le Breton | Tue 23rd February 2010 - 3:10 pm

On Friday 19 February 2010 from 9am until midnight, the BBC Parliament channel gave us the chance to relive the February 1974 election by broadcasting the whole of Election Night 74, hosted by Alistair Burnett.

When I stumbled on the coverage at 6 pm, the programme was reaching 1.00 pm on Friday 1 March, the day after polling day.  By that stage, 600 results were in and the Conservatives were a dozen seats and a few thousand votes behind Labour.  The swingometer, operated by Robert McKenzie, showed a 2% swing to Labour from the Conservatives but this failed to register the real flow of …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: “Si, se puede”

By Bill le Breton | Sat 16th January 2010 - 2:40 pm

In 2006 two filmmakers decided to document the first term of a little known US senator called Barack Obama. Within nine months their rookie was running for president.

The resulting two hour HBO documentary was shown on BBC Two last Saturday (9th Jan). If you didn’t see it, do all you can to track it down somewhere, somehow. It is clear that the film-makers formed a trusted relationship with Barack, Michelle and his team so the access to the deeds, the techniques, the emotions and the inspiration of the whole cast from candidate to ten year …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: But is it really time for a change?

By Bill le Breton | Thu 10th December 2009 - 3:53 pm

Party strategists have bet heavily on their assessment that voters think it is time for a change.

Perhaps simplistically, they hold to the notion that British political fortunes are governed by a pendulum. You often hear them criticise what they term the blue/red red/blue swings, but privately they accept it as a fundamental ‘law’ of political physics and have allowed themselves to be governed by this supposed law these last two years.

2010 will be one of those ‘Time for a Change’ elections, they have deduced.

From that deduction they moved on to suggest that the Conservatives (to whom in their estimate the pendulum has swung) have won the argument among the British public that they, the Conservatives, are the party of change.

The next step in the analysis was to presume that attacks on Conservatives or Conservative policies would thus position the Liberal Democrats as against change and therefore implicitly pro the status quo and, deep down in voter consciousness, pro-Labour.

Among leading Liberal Democrat MPs this conclusion may have been conveniently close to their political preferences, for others – and I think we may include Cable in this – it makes for an agonising and uncomfortable position.

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Why this is no time for “Savage Cuts”

By Bill le Breton | Mon 2nd November 2009 - 12:15 pm

Those concerned that the drive to lower the deficit by cutting government spending in the near term will stall recovery and lead to the so-called double dip recession have had their views strengthened by the publication of Slash and Grow? Spending cuts and economic recovery by liberal think-tank Centre Forum.

The big hint is in the little question mark of the title. After twenty-eight pages of detailed analysis, Centre Forum summarises i its news release:

Osborne’s plan for cuts imperils Britain’s recovery.

George Osborne’s determination to cut the deficit at all costs risks leaving the economy sluggish and the government still mired

…

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: If you go down to the woods today…

By Bill le Breton | Sat 10th October 2009 - 6:20 pm

At the end of the thread to my last offering there was an invitation from Mark Wright to comment on whether I still thought our conference was a disaster. Yes, I do Mark; I know it was; day by day I grow more and more certain.

My case was never based on poll performance (especially during the conference season) and Sunday’s new ComRes poll with its CON 40% (+2), LAB 28% (+5), LDEM 19% (-4) figures should remind us why. No, for me the evaluation was always to do with lost opportunities. May I try to explain my reasoning?

Back in the …

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: The disaster of Bournemouth was avoidable

By Bill le Breton | Sat 26th September 2009 - 10:25 am

This was always going to be a disastrous conference. We have spent our annual opportunity to reach out to people by communicating a confused image. When the country needed hope, vision and leadership we offered it the ‘straight talk of progressive austerity’.

This disaster was foreseeable.

It was made from a dangerous mixture of a wrong political strategy (based on a wrong economic strategy) added to a leadership and a communications team which had very, very little political experience.

Ming Campbell and Vince Cable when they came to conference as leaders had to be stabilisers with a reassuring …

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Posted in Conference and Op-eds | Tagged | 26 Comments



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