Nikkei's up slightly. The others are down about 1%. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
12 month pound vs euro:
I still need to start my "Countdown to Yen-Dollar Parity" series one of these days. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
Well done us.
It's politics and self-image. Although the mid-level business community is for joining, the angry Daily Mail proles aren't, and the feckless rich aren't. With the Tories practically guaranteed a win in 2010, there's no pressure at all to join - they're certainly not going to propose it because their base would skin them alive.
It's more important to most of the population to cultivate a narcissistic image of specialness than it is to deal with reality. So we're going to sail through 1:1, it's going to be the ECB's fault because of something or other, and we're going to carry on down to the floor - wherever that is.
When I went to the LibDem conference last September there was a Very Serious Person™ from The City in the audience at the European Policy session who pointed out that if there were a serious crisis "which the current hiccup isn't" (paraphrased: I felt like slapping the guy to wake him up) then the UK should join the Euro. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
But given that we de facto are already in the eurozone (we're mutually pegged so tight to the Bundesbank ECB that the only difference is a trip or two to the local FOREX anyway...) I suspect we could join as soon as we could get the new notes and coins in circulation.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
