I hope you are well this afternoon?

I wanted to get in touch with recent findings from CABA, the charity supporting the wellbeing of chartered accountants and their families who found have that more than half (53%) of accountants agreed that ‘accountancy will always be considered an elite profession’.

Can’t Ritchie just apply for a hardship grant from these people rather than attempting to build Musso’s dream in our green and pleasant land?

And who thought there would be a charity to support hard pressed accountants – and limited to chartered ones at that?

The so-called Yellowhammer report is wrong. I can say that with absolute confidence. Every forecast is, and I’ve delivered a lot in my time, always with that caveat attached to them. But in my opinion that does not mean it is not important. That’s precisely its significance.

All it really says with certainty is four things. The first is that we do not know what will happen if we hard-Brexit.

Err, that’s what the report is telling us. What will happen.

Jeebus:

I am writing this sitting in a hotel breakfast room. Simple observation shows that obvious that the assumption that we are indifferent to others is false. People are cooperating over the breakfast buffet. That buffet shows that someone cares – and profit alone cannot explain that. The staff are attentive, and very clearly being respected. The interaction of those within the room is interesting to observe – most especially at the tables where colleagues are meeting before a working day: the interactions are clearly about more than personal gain. There are enquiries made as to well-being that are obviously sincere: the ‘other’ matters at a level far beyond their utility.

And we all know this is true. And yet we organise our economy as if it is not. And that is the paradox that is laying our society, our well-being and our lives low in the twenty first century.

That hotel breakfast room is indeed the economy. And look at it, people are cooperating and it all works.

Which is what we do in that economy. You know, interact and cooperate.

Or as we might put it, try not to use the example of a market economy working to rail against a market economy. The logic doesn’t really work if you do…..

It makes no damn difference:

I was asked by a person with a political persuasion to prepare some slides for them so that they might present my ideas on what I call Sustainable Cost Accounting.

The argument is on the production methods of the company. OK. So, apply to an oil company. Their production methods might be mildly emittive. But that’s not the point, is it? The people who buy the products are going to be doing an awful lot of emitting.

That is, this new accounting method doesn’t actually solve any known problem.

This is my kind of macroeconomics:

The abstract says:

The case for central bank independence is built on an intellectual two-step. Step one argues there is a problem of inflation prone government. Step two argues independence is the solution to that problem. This paper challenges that case and shows it is based on false politics and economics. The paper argues central bank independence is a product of neoliberal economics and aims to institutionalize neoliberal interests.

Of course Snippa won’t like it.

The actual aim of central bank independence being to stop politicians inflating the hell out of the money supply as Snippa wants to do.

Not that that’s neoliberal, it’s just a rational constraint on the excesses which public choice economics leaves us prey to.