In the gutter, but, looking up at the stars
Joined July 2011
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William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
Things I’m wondering tonight: Are we going to discover that the entire AI bubble was in part supported by Chinese demand for backdoor Nvidia chips and surplus dollar recycling into hyperscaler and Neocloud debt?
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
Here's the impact of this level of regulation on your household finances:
Using a 5% interest rate over 25 years on a 90% LTV, the cost of the £775k home is £4,079 per month. If you didn't have the givernment imposed costs (the red ones in the chart), your mortgage would be £1,753, which gives you £2,326 a month to do things (like meet a partner, have kids and so on).
To put it another way, the government has taken the equivalent of a £34k a year salary (which is the UK median) out of your household income in the borrowing requirement it has imposed on you through these regulations.
They've stolen a whole working member of your household.
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
This is superlative work from Ben.
How's that 40 years of neoliberalism coming along?
Government imposed policy costs make up 57% of the clearing price of a new flat in London and 42% of a new home in the Home Counties.
Despite a big housing shortage and positive planning reforms, new home starts in England are declining from 182,000 in 2022 to under 125,000 last year.
While the macroeconomic context has worsened with build cost inflation and high interest rates, the Government is imposing more burdens on new homes, not fewer.
Taxes, levies, planning, and mandates add over £440,000 to the cost of delivering a home in London and nearly £225,000 nearby, with several of these imposed recently like the Second Staircase, Future Homes Standard, Building Safety Levy, Biodiversity Net Gain and Residential Property Developer Tax.
Individually these may be justified, but together they are making new homes unviable.
As a result, large developers are buying less land and small builders are going out of business; nearly 4,000 construction firms went bust just last year.
If we want to build more homes, we should be easing the burdens on them, not adding more.
Making housebuilding viable again is the most important issue in housing policy and my co-author, Edward Donovan, has completed excellent modelling showing how big the challenge is.
Read the full report: cps.org.uk/wp-content/upload…
And simulate what changing the policies does with Edward's modelling here: easing-the-burdens.cps.org.u…
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
The answer to “why is my £775k new build flat so small and crappy?” Is simple: the money left to actually build it after the government has took their £442k share is only £178k - less than some spend on their kitchen extension
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
For those who don't get the Lou Pai reference..
He was the CEO of Enron Energy Services and pulled off the cleanest executive exit in Wall Street history right before the company collapsed.
In early 2000, Pai knocked up a stripper named Melanie. Who later became his second wife. His first wife of 20 years understandably filed for divorce.
During the divorce settlement, a family court judge forced Pai to liquidate his Enron shares and options to split the marital assets. Between May and June 2000 he cashed out roughly $250 mil right near the absolute peak of the stock.
A year later, Enron went to zero and the feds came after every executive for insider trading. Pai kept almost everything (only paying a tiny $31.5M civil settlement later) and became one of the largest landowners in Colorado. You can't convict a guy for a court mandated divorce sale.
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
So Labour are absolutely fine with giving the HMRC powers to go into the bank accounts of those who are WORKING, but not those on benefits which could be committing fraud
Pretty much sums this party up!
🔴 Healey scraps crackdown on welfare fraud
Read more ⬇️
telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
Best description I've heard of Labour's tax on private schools:
"A tax that raises less than it costs isn’t a tax.
It’s spite with a spreadsheet.
Aimed at the parents who sacrificed, and dressed up as fairness."
Businessman Alex Lovén in Times interview.
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
At @lfg_uk we have been making this clear for months and months.
Our government, our public bodies do NOTHING.
Our infrastructure is in collapse, we maintain nothing, we build nothing.
We can't rely on the foresight of the past, we must maintain and BUILD!
Just six of the 30 bridges over the Thames are in “good” or “fair” condition, according to the London Technical Advisory Group.
The city’s official engineering adviser has said the bridges in poor conditions could face the threat of closure without hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer funding.
🔗 telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
For a dose of optimism, see my column in today's @Telegraph
'Had the Iran war come 15 or 20 years ago, it may well have caused a recession in major parts of the world.
To understand what has changed, consider the fitness watch so many of us proudly sport. Each day, it tracks your sleep, calories, heart rate and a host of other things. Why? In the hope that by monitoring and adapting to bodily changes in real time, we might put off the unsuspecting morning when the world turns black.
Like the health enthusiast, modern businesses utilise real-time data and technology to monitor and manage vitals – such as demand, supply and prices – to optimise production.
The result is a steadier and more shock-resilient economy.'
#economics #macro
telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
To give you an idea of how insane the UK’s new anti-porn law is, people are pointing out you could potentially spend years in prison for filming *yourself* giving head and the Labour MP who pushed the law responds with “well maybe you shouldn’t be giving head anyway”
This quoted post is unavailable.
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
Demanding economic growth has become unfashionable among some people in Europe.
Instead they speak of a “cost of living crisis”.
But it’s really one and the same.
Economic growth means that incomes rise relative to prices.
Economic growth means that the things we need become more affordable.
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
Ya tenemos la foto completa del hackeo de Binance. Y es mucho peor de lo que se contó anoche: 6.300 millones de dólares. El mayor robo de la historia de las criptomonedas. Cuatro veces el de Bybit.
Os explico lo que ha pasado, porque la historia es de película.
No reventaron ninguna clave privada. Hackearon el portátil de UN ingeniero de Binance. Desde ese portátil accedieron a un contenedor interno del sistema y empezaron a firmar retiradas como si fueran la propia Binance. En una sola transacción contra una de las hot wallets había 50 autorizaciones firmadas. El atacante no rompió la caja fuerte: se sentó en la silla del empleado que tiene la llave.
Resultado: vaciaron hot wallets en DIEZ blockchains a la vez. 200.630 ETH y 185 tokens en Ethereum, 18.270 bitcoins, 233 millones de XRP, más Solana, Tron, Avalanche... La mayor parte de los 6.300 millones salió en apenas 20 minutos.
El detalle que parece escrito por un guionista: dos días antes, Binance había anunciado que acababa de repeler una campaña de hackers de Corea del Norte que usaban falsas entrevistas de trabajo para colar malware. Repelieron el asalto a la puerta y entraron por la ventana del empleado. Hoy TRM Labs y Chainalysis atribuyen el ataque "con alta confianza" a TraderTraitor, la unidad norcoreana del grupo Lazarus. Los mismos de Bybit. Han cuadruplicado su propio récord en 20 meses.
La contraofensiva también ha sido histórica: en menos de 12 horas se han congelado unos 3.000 millones. Tether bloqueó más de 1.500, Circle 823, Ripple unos 200 en RLUSD, y hasta Coinbase, el mayor competidor de Binance, se ofreció a ayudar bloqueando envíos a las direcciones del hacker. La mitad del botín ya está muerto. La otra mitad, en Bitcoin y Ethereum que nadie puede congelar, se está lavando ahora mismo en cadenas de transferencias cada vez más pequeñas.
Binance ha suspendido las retiradas mientras revisa sus sistemas, asegura que los fondos de los usuarios serán cubiertos al completo, y espera reabrir en unas 48 horas. Ese será el verdadero momento de la verdad: el día que reabran, veremos si la confianza aguanta.
Y una reflexión final: el mayor hackeo de la historia no ha tocado la criptografía. Ha tocado a una persona. Las blockchains funcionaron perfectamente. El eslabón débil sigue siendo el mismo de siempre.
A Binance lo hackearon por una nueva estafa que se llama entrevista de trabajo.
Binance tiene mucho software y son más vulnerables, hay más formas de entrar, requiere mayor seguridad.
En el caso de Tangem o Ledger, tu tienes toda la seguridad de la propia blockchain, y no estás expuesto en diferentes servidores ni eres un blanco público de billones de dólares, a no ser que tu la cagues interactuando con algún protocolo que no deberías o comprendo tu wallets ya modificada.
Y es importante que se entienda que han hackeado a Binance, no a la blockchain .
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
Also worth noting that nominal disposable income is up almost 45% in the UK over the last decade. The "jaws" has been inflation. Yes, Ukraine and Iran were exogenous shocks, but two decades of UK energy policy failure have amplified these impacts.
The most bullish thing for the UK economic outlook this week was a very clear grabbing back of UK energy policy by HMT, from DESNZ. The only industrial strategy worthy of the name is cheaper energy. All the workhorse economic metrics (RHDI, Corporate Margins, Business Investment) benefit from cheaper energy. This is not about shoehorning in renewables, or N Sea O&G, or Nuclear policy. It is about a model where 24/7/365 there is plentiful, cheap energy to input into economic activity.
If I were shaping UK economic policy I would prioritise delivering cheap energy over all other economic goals (actively moving resources from the myriad of downstream projects, to pursuing this single goal) - and approach the policy trade-offs accordingly.
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
A defensible @EdConwaySky "MoneySavingExpert" British model hypothesis is not that govts prioritise low prices. It's that rather than deliver them through markets, they tinker with cross-subsidies & price structures to appease Lewis, compounding underlying inefficiency!
"I had a list of seven or eight things that I suggested to the Chancellor and I've been pretty gobsmacked that five of them were in the budget."
Martin Lewis, Founder of Money Saving Expert, reacts to Chancellor John Healey's first budget.
#Newsnight
William Cooper🇬🇧🇮🇪🇺🇦 retweeted
Has the Foreign Office considered despatching Torsten Bell and the Resolution Foundation to hostile states to advise them on economic policy? Akin to Germany putting Lenin on a train to Petrograd, it could be a remarkably effective form of economic warfare.
