Former Reagan budget director David Stockman has a full-blown conniption in the New York Times about “quantitative easing” (a.k.a. “governments printing money like there’s no tomorrow”, as I observed in today’s Ottawa Sun) in the United States… and not without reason. If they keep it up, tomorrow’s going to be pretty grim when it arrives as dates on the calendar tend to do.
Archive for the ‘G20’ Category
Money for nothing, risks for free
There’s a really good, and really scary, piece in today’s Daily Telegraph by Spectator editor Fraser Nelson on the British government’s radical gamble that extremely loose monetary policy can do what people used to think extremely loose fiscal policy could do. But they were wrong the first time and probably are this time too. There really is no such thing as a free lunch, and if believing there is prevents you from getting food the old-fashioned way the end result is usually way too little to eat. Nelson argues that the policy of artificially depressing interest rates has huge costs that Britons have not even tried to debate. Which should worry Canadians too.
Stop the wind farms, for peat’s sake
It’s not that easy being green, as Kermit the Frog rightly noted. For instance the Telegraph reports a new study, funded by Scotland’s very pro-wind-power SNP government, carried out by researchers trusted by environmentalists and previewed in the journal Nature (link here – but behind a paywall), finding that a typical British wind farm is built on a peat bog. And? And this: peat bogs are hugely important carbon sinks, Europe’s most important and on a par with rain forests. But only if they stay wet. And regrettably, the study says, when you drive roads through them, build large facilities and otherwise create wind farms, it tends to drain them, causing them to belch huge amounts of CO2.
Dang.
Canada should prepare for more worldwide turmoil, report warns
An alarming new report warns the next year “could be even more troublesome” for Canada than 2012 in terms of global trouble spots and economic worries.
“The Middle East is in worse shape than at the beginning of the Arab Spring; Iran looms ever more ominously … North Korea threatens the U.S. with nuclear weapons; the tone between China and Japan and other players of the region over islands dotting the South and East China Seas has become harsher,” said the Conference of Defence Associations Institute (CDAI) in its latest strategic outlook. Read more…
This just in – Britain cold and dark
No, no, not a weather joke. A government joke. Seems Britain is in danger of drastically increased energy prices and widespread shortages, the Telegraph reports, because… get ready for it… the wise and foresighted beings we call politicians shut down too many of the old power plants they feared contributed to global warming while the alternate energy they promised hasn’t delivered enough power soon enough.
Amazing, huh?
