James Meadway
@meadwaj
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Economist, views own, RTs are not endorsements. Macrodose podcast, every Weds: https://t.co/ZfBbXTBimD @macrodosepod
Joined June 2009
Did an interview with @MayaGoodfellow in the Guardian on @macrodosepod, why economics is failing as a discipline and how politics has yet to process the depth and severity of the climate crisis….
🟢 Your Weekly Fix of Climate Economics 🟢. Read @meadwaj's interview on Macrodose in today's @guardian👇
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This is honestly one of the best and clearest descriptions of what is happening in the economy today you will find, all delivered in under a minute.
@JessicaLBarnard @RMTunion Everyone rightfully talking about his Kay Burley interview, but they way he doesn't even miss a beat in his response here. What. A. Man.
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If your workplace isn’t safe, you don’t have to work there. Section 44 of the 1996 Employment Rights Act is clear on this. Stay home, save lives.
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£700 extra on gas bill is a disaster. But the gas cap rise is political decision, not some force of nature. Gov't could halt it, levy windfall tax on super-profits, bring failing suppliers into public ownership. Instead they prioritise profits over living standards.
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The age thing is a class thing. The younger you are in Britain today, the more likely you are to be working class by any useful definition: lower (and falling wages), insecure work, no assets owned.
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.@garyseconomics speaking to rally outside the Treasury for a wealth tax: “We can win… we need to build this.”. He’s right.
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The unions don’t want people to die.
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There's absolutely no - none, zero - good reason to restrict furlough scheme payments. Govt borrowing costs are lowest ever, virus still strongly present, so affordability not an issue. This is a disgraceful attempt to starve people back to work in manifestly unsafe conditions.
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Eat Out to Help Out really was the most idiotic economic policy in modern British history. The combination of cost, gimmickry, and dire public health consequences puts it in a league of its own. Absolutely spectacular.
Eat Out To Help Out cost £849m in total. you could buy all 1.4 million kids elegible for free school meals a £400 Chromebook and 12 months of £20-a-month broadband for roughly the same amount of money (£896m). Might have been a better investment over the summer.
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Broadband was huge in the 70s. Huge.
Free broadband? Labour is a party of Marxists stuck in the 1970s
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*rubs temples* this is literally something that you are paying for right now under capitalism.
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The NHS documents are a game-changer. How do we know? By the panicky reactions from official media sources - print and broadcast - as they try to downplay them. They know.
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Launching today: Kerala's free, publicly-owned broadband service. 2m poor families to recieve free internet access. Completely impossible and unaffordable in Britain, of course.
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There is absolutely loads of money. Britain is an extremely wealthy country. The problem is that its wealth is hoarded by a small number of people and a handful of institutions at the expense of the majority.
Paul McNamara, "There is no money, be honest about it. In fact, the Institute of Fiscal Studies said, whoever wins the next election will inherit the worst financial situation for 70 years". What a legacy for 14 years of Conservative party rule #C4News
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I tell you what that booing and heckling from the Tory section of the audience when Jeremy talked about climate change affecting the poorest was something. Obviously had no idea how bad and shocking it looks #LeadersDebate.
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Just walked home through Stratford shopping centre, round corner from 2012 Olympics. There are tens upon tens of people bedding down for the night. We live in 5th richest economy on the planet - don’t let any shitbag try and claim there is no money to deal with this.
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Mick Lynch now prime contender for having completed the most successful media round in history.
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“A healthy country and democracy”
Il primo ministro, il leader dell’opposizione e i loro vice che, nonostante divisioni, divergenze e attacchi reciproci, scherzano e chiacchierano amichevolmente prima del Discorso del Re in Parlamento. Un Paese e una democrazia sani: il Regno Unito 🇬🇧❤️👑.
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The decision to raise the energy price cap was a political one. It was a choice made by a government agency to impose the cost of the gas price spike on households, in order to protect industry profits. There was no necessity to do this and the decision can be reversed.
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Financial Times finds a missing £3bn in the Tories’ manifesto:
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Barbados:. 1. Ditch monarchy (last week).2. Implement UBI (this week).
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I worked at a thinktank for years & this is bollocks. The question of who finances such organisations & those working in them is critical to their proper function in democratic society & should always be asked. A lack of transparency on their funding is antithetical to democracy.
I am leaving the IEA as of 1 Jan 2019. I will miss it. But I won't miss the endless "who funds you?" tweets. They reveal a profound misunderstanding of the kind of people who work at think tanks and what motivates them. And always irrelevant to the issue at hand. So stupid.
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This is one of the very worst economics explainers I have ever seen. Fatuous, economically illiterate garbage. Government finances are not like a household’s. No to cuts.
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These were the rules that also got Keir Starmer elected. Outrageous spin by the BBC.
TONIGHT: Keir Starmer is planning to scrap the leadership rules which enabled predecessor Jeremy Corbyn to get elected. Is this a step in the right direction or does he risk a Labour civil war?. Labour MP @BenPBradshaw and member of Labour's NEC @LauraPidcock join us. #Newsnight
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This is what Ireland is doing. 203 euros a week for all employed, unemployed, self-employed, guaranteed for six weeks. We can do the same here, too, and we need to do it immediately. #coronavirus.
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Johnson is running a Trump campaign. The worst possible response is to gripe about how unfair and uncivilised he is, and do nothing but that. When they go low, we go somewhere else: drag him onto class politics, 99% vs 1%, and back it up with real policy. Otherwise we lose.
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We've not run out of money. The credit card is not maxed out. Interest rates for govt are close to the lowest in human history. And the Bank of England is issuing enough QE to cover the entire cost of borrowing this year.
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The news about vaccine passports, facial recognition technology for pubs, workplace surveillance in the home relate directly to reports of police violence against protestors. These aren’t separate and coincidental processes; this is authoritarian capitalism coming into view.
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Labour projected to win landslide with a smaller share of the vote than Labour lost with in 2017. A sandcastle majority: a change in the tide and it goes.
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35% vote share projection. No Parliamentary majority on this basis. 5% worse than Jeremy Corbyn 2017. Interesting times ahead.
BREAKING: Labour on course to be largest party - but short of overall majority, according to Sky News projection. Read more🔗.
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What rubbish. The Bank's *own inflation report today* says:. "The pick-up in annual pay growth since the time of the May Report had been concentrated in higher-paying sectors such as financial and business services. Pay growth in lower-paid sectors. had been broadly flat.".
"We cannot continue to have the current level of wage increase". Bank of England Governor, Andrew Bailey, says the current levels of price setting and wage setting are "unsustainable", after the BoE raises interest rates to 5%. 📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602
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So to summarise, a bunch of Oxford and Cambridge graduates who live in London are very very keen on seeing lots of investment taking place in Oxford Cambridge and London. But don’t worry, this time it’s going to be very different to all the other times this has happened.
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Exit polls from Germany show collapse in Green vote & their replacement for 2nd place by far right AfD. This is a disaster happening not *despite* the climate crisis, but to significant extent *because of* climate crisis & failure of technocratic environmental politics. 1/2.
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The Treasury Doom Loop in action: we can’t invest any money, because the economy is in such a bad state. Why is the economy in such a bad state? Because we didn’t invest any money. Why didn’t we invest any money? Because the economy was in such a bad state….
As Labour drops its pledge to spend £28bn a year on green investments, Sir Keir blamed the party's major U-turn on the Conservatives' 'reckless' plans to 'max out on the government credit card' after doing 'terrible damage to our economy'
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We are sleepwalking to Reform victory in 2029. Labour have speed run government failure & Stamer/McSweeny’s major achievement is to destroy any internal route for the thoroughgoing cleansing the party now needs. Greens and all forces to left of Labour have to up their game…1/4.
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Apologies, but whenever this comes up, if has to be done:. Labour vote 2017: 12,887,918.Labour vote 2019: 10,269,051.Labour vote 2024: 9,708,716. Maybe there’s a lot of Citizen Smiths out there or something, who knows.
Corbynism was the ultimate political nostalgia movement of my lifetime. Thousands of Citizen Smith re enactment society types, re-fighting the old Militant Tendency battle rather than looking outward to the voting public.
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The "addiction" framing is repugnant.
Rishi Sunak is preparing to “wean” businesses and workers off the government’s furloughing scheme by cutting wage subsidies amid concerns that the nation has become “addicted”
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Jeremy Corbyn lead Labour in the only general election in which it gained seats for over twenty years. In a chain of otherwise continual losses since.1997 (!), it should be uncontroversial that there might be something for Labour to learn today from 2017.
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This is, obviously, rubbish: Momentum fought like tigers, they canvassed, they argued, they persuaded. Tens of thousands of ordinary members did that. It is a tremendous insult to them and their efforts to imply this is a “betrayal”.
This needs to be said over, over and over. Corbyn and his coterie, aided and abetted by Momentum, have betrayed class, party, country and Europe. Political ineptitude on a grand scale, Yes, the heavens wept today. One day it can and must be different. But without them .
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Bank of England: “we’re all worse off, we all have to take our share”. Financial Times:
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This is the best response I've ever seen to the stupid style of questioning - beloved also of the British media - that thinks good politics is about memorising numbers, and the more numbers you memorise, the better the politics.
Green’s Leader Adam Bandt with the perfect response to this “gotcha” question and a message to all you “journalists” out there that think this a good way to treat this election campaign. #auspol #AusVotes2022 #Elections2022
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No, it isn’t. Whacking up taxes on workers whilst protecting landlords is not, under any circumstances, “leaning left”.
This is what leaning left on the economy and leaning right on culture looks like. It is a new era in British politics.
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Sunday Times front page claiming Tories want live TV debate between former Deutsche Bank credit derivatives trader Sajid Javid and @johnmcdonnellMP. please, please let this happen, an absolute *gift* for Labour if it does.
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Embarrassing. Reeves has a masters from LSE and so she must know that, even in terms of mainstream economics, this is drivel. Notice it is not challenged. But it serves a purpose: it justifies the doom loop. And the doom loop means finance always wins even if the rest of us lose.
"She needed to make sure that everything that she was spending, she could afford". Chancellor Rachel Reeves tells @bbcnickrobinson about childhood memories of her mother's budgeting at home . Listen to #PoliticalThinking in full on @BBCSounds . 🎧
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If he’s saying this about Italy, where does that leave us, do you think?.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking.” The head of a visiting Chinese Red Cross delegation helping Italy respond to the coronavirus crisis says the country is not doing enough to contain the virus
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Was obvious from 2017 election result (and years of polling beforehand) that the economics Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell stood for was broadly popular. Danger for Labour was always that Tories would realise this. And now here we are. #Budget2021.
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If government can intervene to put football clubs into the hands of their fans, government can intervene to put companies into the hands of their workers.
Scoop: Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has told officials to draw up a list of "very robust options" to take action against the 6 English ESL clubs. Told one of the options is the German 50+1% model of fan representation. All options on the table.
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Absolutely wild to me that people think the correct response to rising prices is to *pay people less*.
Still trying to get my head round the fact that on a day when inflation topped 11% there are people on the Left still seriously trying to argue wage restraint and public spending restraint aren't necessary.
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President Biden aims to spend $100 billion so every home and business can get broadband
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If Dan can explain how people are supposed to self-isolate when they can’t work from home and can’t pay the rent or bills unless they work, he is welcome to do so. Until then, these demands are essential.
I actually like @OwenJones84. But if you want a gold-plated example of how the Corbynites have decided to switch into attack mode - and start exploiting the Coronavirus crisis politically - check out his "Five Demands" tweet. It's priceless.
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So make them funded, then. Could start with Capital Gains Tax and income tax equalisation. £16bn/year. Scrapping two child cap is £1.3bn.
‘We cannot make unfunded spending commitments’. Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary Jonathan Ashworth says Labour will ‘not be changing’ its new policy to keep the two-child cap on benefits if it gets into government .
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Trust No Polls. This, categorically, is an outlier, at odds with any other evidence we have. Two million registrations to vote should tell all of us that. What matters in a volatile and low trust environment is the campaign. Keep on keeping on.
We are about to give the most vicious and nationalistic Conservative party in modern history carte blanche to do whatever it wants. If we don’t vote tactically, we’re fucked.
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Wrong. Economics is all about choices and they are choosing to hurt most of us. No to cuts, no to austerity - tax the rich. Build the anti-austerity movement everywhere.
Starmer: "There's a budget coming in October. And I will be honest with you- it's going to be painful. We have no other choice, given the situation that we're in. I'll have to turn to the country and make big asks of you as well. To accept short term pain for long term good.".
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"Don't go to work, but do go to parties" is absolutely correct advice and how we *should* be thinking about covid-19 over the longer term. If we have to ration social contacts we should prioritise those we enjoy, and deprioritise those we do not. .
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Sunak has announced something pretty reasonable for those employed, pretty bad for the self employed and small businesses (5m plus people) and sweet FA if you rent. Feels like they are starting to understand gravity of situation but fundamentally do not get it.
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Happy to confirm that Gary is a longstanding campaigner for something he believes in. Is that meant to be a problem now?.
Stevenson has been shilling with his comrades for ages - 2022
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A lot of people on the old socialist left are going to have revise their ideas about the English Greens pretty quickly if they want to make anything of the next 4-5 years.
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Not had a good old-fashioned moral panic about music for a while.
Labour Minister tells Glastonbury to "think very carefully" about Kneecap playing the festival.
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Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is a government failure. Don't whitewash it.
When this is all over and there’s a public inquiry into how things went so calamitously wrong, there will be many culprits. But one culprit will be us, the public
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For all the fuss around Labour’s spectacular poll lead, assuming the Tories are now beyond recovery, the party will enter government in the most dreadful economic situation since the 1930s: cost of living crisis, interest rates through roof, spiralling debt, zero growth… 1/2.
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Appalling. Why has the NHS not been overwhelmed? Because the decision was taken to push the crisis into care homes.
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This is perhaps the most important graph in the document - share widely. Interest rates are so low that despite the extra borrowing, we're paying less on interest than ever. We're nowhere near running out of money and there is no need for cuts. Share widely!.
Debt has risen above 100% of GDP for first time since 1960-61, but the cost of servicing that debt falls to new historic lows. #SpendingReview
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Winter is approaching and we have to import half the gas we use. And more than half the food we eat. It's all fine.
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Johnson's surrender Brexit deal manages to be worse than May's, with fewer protections of existing rights and the fast route to low-tax, no protection US vassal state economy. Any Labour MP voting for it should have the whip removed, simple as that.
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This is madness. NHS data is one of the most valuable on the planet, conservatively estimated at £9.6bn annually. Yet this government is *giving* it away, not for the public good, but for private benefit. And Johnson’s US trade deal will make matters worse
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The eagle-eyed reader may notice that this is precisely what Labour said it would do in 2017, practically word for word.
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New Labour was neoliberal and this should not be a controversial point.
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Osborne was catastrophic failure as Chancellor - far worse than Kwarteng, the extent of whose damage has been strikingly limited, unlike the 300,000 excess deaths attributable to austerity version one 1/3.
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Buying a house "costs an awful lot of money", but people still do it because, um, you get a house.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money". The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
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This is the sort of politics I’ve been talking about the Greens missing. No illusions about the dangers ahead, but clear on the real potential for their breakthrough.
We need bold leadership. Now. That's why I'm running to be the next leader of the Green Party. Join our campaign: #BackZack
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You see the problem here is that this is expensive and involves taking on assorted vested interests, whereas cosplaying Enoch Powell is cheap and doesn’t.
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Public pressure saved lives.
‘Public and media pressure pushed the lockdown. We didn’t want it’. -Cabinet Minister via @Telegraph . -Astonishing . #COVID19
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Your regular reminder that Jo Swinson propped up a Tory government, supported austerity 100%, and *still*, unbelievably, defends it now. Vote Lib Dem, get Tory.
Your regular reminder that Jeremy Corbyn wants to negotiate a Brexit deal. He is a Brexiteer.
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No, there would *not* have been a run on the pound if the government had decided against freezing a few more pensioners to death this winter. It’s £1.4bn from a budget of £1,200bn. This argument is the same foolishness Nick Clegg fell for back in 2010 to justify austerity 1.0.
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Thing is: there is no, as in none, as in it doesn’t exist, amount of money at a macro level that can solve this economic crisis. We need to reorientate how stuff is produced: pouring money into markets that are getting to the point of being unable to function will not work.
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This has a sticky quality to it. Very hard to shake off without also reversing the policy position.
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This rubbish and no one should fall for it. The IFS should not be playing the same dreadful role today that it did with propping up austerity in 2010s. Profits have recovered spectacularly since 2020, wages have not. So reduce profits, raise wages. (See link in next tweet.).
This is a classic collective action problem. Completely rational for every individual group of workers to ask for a big pay rise. Each will be better off if they get one - assuming employer can afford it/pass it on. But collectively very bad news if everyone gets a big rise.
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The last time inflation was this high, not far off 50% of employees were in trade unions and c.80% were covered by collective bargaining. They had some protection against it. That doesn’t apply now. This is a social catastrophe far worse than the 1970s as a result….
UK inflation forecast to hit around 19% by January, most people under a certain age have no memory of what that means in practice .
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Got to say: *how* are the Greens failing to capitalise? Not rhetorical just wondering what Greens think they are doing right now.
Westminster Voting Intention:. LAB: 26% (=).CON: 24% (+2).RFM: 23% (-4).LDM: 14% (+2).GRN: 8% (=).SNP: 3% (=). Via @BMGResearch, 26-27 Mar. Changes w/ 25-26 Feb.
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Quite funny to see an idea move so quickly from mockery, condescension, only mad lefties could possibly think this etc etc to the most mainstream of the mainstream.
The route to lower inflation is for companies to cut their profit margins, the IMF's deputy director @GitaGopinath said yesterday. "If inflation is to fall quickly, firms must allow their profit margins—which have shot up during the past two years—to decline and absorb some of.
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We are watching real-time attempt to construct consensus around the so-called £50bn "black hole" in public finances. The "black hole" is product of assumptions fed into models and the govt's fiscal rule, *not* a hard economic fact. Yet much media commentary pretends otherwise.
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A "Frequent Flyer Levy" is a brilliant idea -allows you to cut the cost of flying for once-a-year family holidays, whilst making sure those who travel most often for business or because they have a second home abroad pay a higher rate or cut their flights:
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Goldman Sachs calls out AI as a bubble. Which of course it is - and worse than that, one with wildly destructive environmental consequences (which contribute to its bubbly nature).
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The curtain-twitchers are out in force with this one, I see. I hate to break it to you, but once we have a variant as infectious as Omicron your moral scruples really don’t count for much. Continuing to moralise a virus and people’s responses to it isn’t going to help end this.
. Why have you come to Carlisle from Glasgow?. Because there are no restrictions and all of our friends have covid. #bbcnews #ToryCovidCatastrophe
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"The national credit card maxed out. " says Starmer. Someone thinks this is clever but it's not. Basic rule of political framing: DON'T USE YOUR OPPONENT'S FRAMES. You're just repeating their lines. Unless you want to line up an austerity argument for government. Surely not.
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This is entirely abject. So much for "sovereignty" and freedom to make deals with whoever we want. Instead, the country is chained ever more tightly to a declining power and its erratic leadership.
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Watched the interview, and the pearl-clutching is beyond me. A crowd gathered, listened politely, laughed at a joke, cheered at the end. It’s pathetic. How can we reliably expect these people to hold the *actually* powerful - rather than ordinary Rochdale residents - to account?.
Sam Coates showing why he's one of the best in the business. Not easy to keep your cool in an atmosphere like that. Another example of the Trumpification of politics, as legitimate questions from a journalist doing his job gets this reaction.
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Control price rises, limit profits, lo and behold inflation is brought under control.
The Spanish inflation rate in June slowed sharply to 1.9%, which is below the ECB's inflation target. 🇪🇸 gas price cap in power production, limits on rent increases, windfall profit taxation etc. early on did make a difference.
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Huge possibilities have opened up in the space of the last week - we have every chance now to rebuild a popular, radical and ecological left in England on the political basis the French Red-Green New Popular Front has demonstrated so successfully.
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No, we are *not* running out of money. This isn’t how government spending works. After the BBC review found the Corporation was seriously failing its audience with bad economics reporting, perhaps it’s time to take a look at Sky News?.
"We're running out of money". @SamCoatesSky explains that the government need to borrow £4b in order to fund day-to-day spending, while the cost of borrowing is at the highest rate it has been for 16 years. #Ridge 📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233
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You pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
The UK economy lost more than £257 billion in potential output because of demotivated workers last year, adding to a productivity crisis that’s left the country falling behind other wealthy nations
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